The hospital was now a POW camp. The grounds were surrounded by the kind of high fence you’d see on a maximum security prison, razor wire at the top and everything. Outside of the fence were concrete barriers they’d dropped in to keep somebody from getting the bright idea to just ram through the fence with a truck. Yet, John found no human guards on the outside. Were they all in bed? Instead, stationed every two hundred feet or so was a driverless vehicle. On the back of each was a turret, two thin barrels on each side of a cylinder outfitted with a bank of lenses. Mechanical eyes, with radar or infrared or thermal imaging like the Predator. This place was totally being guarded by robotic sentry guns. Badass.
John had come hoping he could just get a look into the yard—if Dave was alive and outside, and if John could get a glimpse of him, that would be enough. But they had covered the damned fence in tarps that, inexplicably, were all printed with misspelled advertisements (blocking the section of fence in front of him was a huge billboard that said TRY THE BLACK ANUS QUARTER POUNDER). He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. John walked all the way around the fencing, a trip that took him at least an hour. Or zero time, depending on how you looked at it. That raised the question in John’s mind as to whether or not time would ever resume to normal speed. What would he do if it just stayed this way forever? Take up a hobby?
John didn’t find an obvious way into the quarantine—he had been hoping that somebody had been walking through an open gate at the exact moment time stopped—and climbing the fence would be no easier in freeze-frame than it would be at normal speed. In fact, the coils of razor wire would be worse in this state of absolute rigidity. John had a vivid image of himself falling into that wire, the blades slicing through his abdomen and shredding his intestines. And John staying like that, writhing in the razors, unable to free himself. Unable to die. For all of eternity.
John completed his circuit and made it around to the front gate again.
John noticed a frozen pillar of smoke that had been drifting horizontally over the fence in the wind, and figured maybe the inmates were all standing around a campfire, roasting weenies or something. If he could just get up high enough to see over the fence …
Boom. There were trees right behind him. They looked fairly climbable. It occurred to John halfway up that this would have been impossible two months earlier—the frozen-in-time leaves would have sliced him open just as effectively as the razor wire. But this was mid-November and he had bare branches to grab onto. He was making good progress right up until he banged his head into an invisible force field. Hanging above him was a gray haze and he finally realized it was the plume of smoke from the campfire, pushed over the fence by a gust of wind that John obviously could not feel. He re-routed himself to get past it and, now at a height where he could easily break his neck if he fell—
and lay writhing and screaming, unheard in the eternity between moments
—he suddenly realized that the plume of campfire smoke formed an imperfect bridge right over the fence and into the quarantine.
Fighting every possible sense of balance and self-preservation, John steadied himself on the gray haze and walked over the fence, trying to keep his eyes forward and not on the impossibly flimsy, transparent bridge he was edging across. The footing wasn’t bad, though; the tiny, suspended particles of ash had a rough texture, like walking on a huge bar of Lava soap.
The plume got uncomfortably narrow as he got closer to the fire, and as soon as he passed over the fences he had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl. He jumped to the ground because it seemed like a bad idea to walk into the glowing embers of a dying bonfire, even if it was frozen in time. He had no idea how that worked.
No longer focusing on trying not to fall on his head, he finally had time to register what was going on in the yard. There were dozens of people in red and green jumpsuits. Well, shit, he didn’t see why the situation in here was any worse than out in town. Nobody had a monster hovering over them and they were all safely behind a fence, guarded by robots. If Dave was here and alive, then it seemed like a best-case scenario. Then John happened to glimpse what was being burned in the fire pit and thought, Oh.
John tore his gaze away from the bones in the ash—he had caught himself trying to count the skulls in there and was up to sixty-two when he stopped—and started moving through the still life of the wax dummy quarantine. None of the people standing in the yard were Dave, so he headed for the hospital itself. Fortunately the door was propped open so he wasn’t going to have to figure out some convoluted way in—
Dave!
There, next to the main entrance of the hospital. John almost missed him because he was bent over, paused in the middle of tying his shoe. He had an open can of beans sitting on the ground next to him, a little plastic spoon sticking out. And there was Molly, standing next to him, poised to start eating the beans with Dave’s attention diverted.
A dam burst inside John, a river of relief crashing through him so hard he almost collapsed.
Dave was alive. Somehow.
His friend was pale, and had lost some weight. A lot of it. And while Dave could stand to lose some weight, he had lost it because he was in a prison camp against his will, eating cold beans and shit. Packed in here with other dudes he almost certainly hated by now, cut off, standing among garbage and broken windows and burning corpses. Because they had left him here. Because John had left him here.
And then another dam burst, this time unleashing a black tide of self-hatred that was poised to come crashing over the sand castle of John’s mind. But he held it at bay, knowing this was no time to let things go dark in his head. He wanted a drink. Later. For now, he was going to take a shot.
“Dave?” said John, and the words seemed to die right in front of him, swallowed into the stillness of the paused world. It was like the little pocket of time that let John move around ended two inches in front of his face, and that’s all the sound could travel. He leaned in closer and said, “Dave, I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m coming. Be ready. Stay near the fence. If anything I’m saying is capable of sinking in, let it be that. Wait for the sound of shit hitting the fan.”
No reaction from Dave, of course. John tried to think of something else that could be accomplished while he was here, but he imagined time suddenly resuming while he was standing here, so that the end result of the whole project would be that he was now trapped inside the quarantine with Amy out there trying to rescue both of them. Falconer would be in several bloody chunks.
John headed to the smoke bridge, followed it back over the fence, and nearly killed himself trying to transition from the solid smoke to the tree branches. But he eventually made it to the ground, landing with a jolt on the immovable grass, and started making his way back to Dave’s house. John’s route took him past the asylum, the main building now with a huge hole in the side that was leaking smoke. And then he saw something that almost made him shit himself.
Shadows. Walking shadows.
This was no trick of the light. These were bona fide shadow men, just like he’d seen in the hospital security video, just as Dave saw in his bathroom recently, just as random folks around Undisclosed had been reporting off and on for as far back as written records were kept. And they were moving. The former Ffirth TB asylum and now former outbreak command center for REPER, was filthy with the shadow men. Moving, twisting through the air. Not frozen, like everything else—one thing John knew about the shadows is that they were unbound by time, which is what made them unspeakably dangerous. Well, that and the fact that they were assholes.
John ran. He made it two blocks before he took a bullet to the shoulder and spun to the ground.
That’s what it felt like, anyway. Something had torn open his shirt and left a red gash underneath. He scrambled to his feet, looking around for a gunman. Finally, he looked back the way he came and saw his assailant: a moth, frozen in midair. Tiny, fragile, yet utterly unmovable. John pressed on, toward Dave’s house, slower this time, glancing back over his wounded shoulder for trailing shadows.
Back in Dave’s yard now, which was unfortunately exactly how he’d left it: with a deformed motherfucker swooping down on Falconer, ready to saw his body into pieces.
This was incredibly frustrating. He had as long as he wanted to form a plan, but since the only thing he could move was his own body, this advantage amounted to nothing more than the ability to throw himself into the monster’s jaws instead of Falconer. Even now, he saw how stupid his idea had been earlier, to try to just shove Falconer out of the way. They’d both wind up on the ground, with the beast on top of them. All he’d be doing is supersizing the monster’s lunch. John wondered if he had stuffed a weapon in his pocket before he froze time, if he’d be free to use it? After all, his clothes moved with him—
Ah, there we go. He did have something.
From Falconer’s point of view, John stood in front of him and started to open his little silver pill bottle. Then John got a momentary look of panic on his face, shouted, “FALCONER LOOK—” and suddenly blinked out of existence. At the exact same moment, a growling, shrieking, inhuman mass of thrashing limbs fell onto Falconer’s back, flinging him to the grass.
Falconer rolled over and whipped out his sidearm in one motion. What was in front of him was a spastic tableau of absurdity.
A grossly deformed once-human monster was rolling around, howling in frustration. It had four jagged limbs full of huge white teeth that it was trying to whip through the air to slash anything in the vicinity. It couldn’t, though, because it was restrained by lengths of cloth that knotted the limbs behind its back like handcuffs. Standing over this flailing, shrieking beast was John, in tiny black jockey shorts, screaming, “Yeah! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck yoooooooouuuuu!!!”
Falconer kicked away from the monster and got to his feet. John looked at him and yelled, “What are you waiting for? Shoot him in the mouth!”
The word “mouth” could not be heard over the gunshots.
A minute later John, heart pounding and breathless, untied his pants from the twitching beast and pulled them on. Falconer was reloading. Falconer had put six bullets in the creature’s maw but John had no idea what it took to kill a spider—the only one he’d ever successfully killed was the one he drowned with the turkeys. Glancing nervously at the creature, John suddenly remembered the real reason he had made Falconer bring him here. He said, “The box.”
