nothing else to do, it’s like it means . . .” He paused, self-conscious.
“No no, I totally get it,” she said. “You worked the whole time to get to ‘the Safe Zone,’ but it lacks ‘the Safe,’ so if that didn’t work, then what will, right? What we’ve got on our hands is one highly unreliable apocalypse. A hundred years of post-Armaggedon narratives! And the world ends without the courtesy of a safe place to go to.”
Michael only nodded. What else was there to say?
At that same moment, as if to prove the “not-safe” point, there was an explosion.
The sound came like a cannon report, maybe a half mile away in the streets of downtown. Michael flinched, which made Holly laugh, though not at all unkindly. “Land mines,” she said. “The captain’s been installing them around the city. Probably that one got set off by a Zed that couldn’t find someplace dark to hide.
“Anyhow, things are dreadful here, granted. But I’m now going to tell you a story that will make you feel better.”
“Okay.”
“So a week ago, the Zeds started pouring into the city and killing lots of people—”
“You’re right. Wow. I literally cannot believe how uplifted I am right now.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha, okay, that’s enough, you.”
Am I, like, flirting right now?
“So the night the evacuation was going on, Hank and I were supposed to leave with our dad, but things were crazy-chaos, and we got separated from him in the crowd. Hank and I wound up on the last evac bus, and it was just about out of the city when Zeds mobbed us. The bus got overturned; people were getting pulled out through the windows. It was even less fun than it sounds.
“Hank and I locked ourselves in this tiny bathroom in the back. I will admit that I cried, and Hank . . . he really tried to be sweet, saying we’d be safe there, that we just had to wait it out. But we could hear everything. A baby screaming, and then not. Soldiers shooting, then not.
“But you know what the very worst moment was?”
Michael shook his head.
“It was when this thought popped into my head. I realized—and I don’t know why—the reason the soldiers in the Zone had stopped calling the dead people ‘the Infected’ when everything was getting so much worse. Why they’d started calling them ‘the Zeds.’”
“Why?”
“Because ‘zed’ is slang for the last letter of the alphabet. And the soldiers thought the world was really coming to an end, that they couldn’t do anything else. And I did, too, you know? But the thing is: the captain found me and Hank, and he’s taking care of us, and we’re gonna be rescued soon.
“Therefore. In conclusion. This isn’t The End. The world isn’t over.”
Michael almost said, Hey, about the soldiers . . . But he couldn’t bring himself to spoil the moment. “So what is the world?” he asked instead.
Holly shrugged, smiling. Michael was again struck by how big her grin was, how open it made her face look. “Just paused, man,” she said.
A couple more gunshots from inside the garage. A moment later, the captain emerged, flush faced, changing out his machine-gun clip with an almost liquid grace. “Clear and clear, by God! Pile back in, platoon. We’re wastin’ daylight,” he called.
As they returned to the Hummer, Holly said, “May I say, for the record, how fab it is to have you guys here now? New friends rawk.”
“Totally,” Michael said.
Friends, Michael thought.
Daaaang.
It’s hard to describe any moment on a planet rife with screaming corpses as “carefree.” But that afternoon came close.
Because as Captain Jopek led them on the methodical Humvee expedition of the downtown grid, Michael felt like he wasn’t just being driven through the city.
He was also being taken through a Postapocalyptic Greatest Hits Collection.
Finding Food. Check.
Collecting Medkits. Check.
Accumulating Bullets. Check.
Searching for Fellow Man. Check.
He found himself relishing the tasks, which were so awesomely familiar from almost Every Video Game Ever. It couldn’t have felt more different than The Game did, and in no small part because somebody else was shaping the day, which—true fact—was awesome.
The captain stuck to the (landmine-free) main roads, going building by building deeper into downtown; Hank X’d off each successive searched street on his map (and Hank also, for no discernible reason other than it was Totally Badass, often requested to hang out on the machine gun-equipped roof of the Hummer whenever the captain went into the buildings). The captain did pick some semi-weird places to look for people,