I took my gun out of my waistband and began cutting through people to get us out of the gang’s oncoming warpath. I felt the crowd push behind us and grabbed Solara’s upper arm to keep the gap between us negligible. In the distance we could make out a small COM compound, and I knew that was the next logical spot on the chessboard. A crowd thirty deep already ringed the wall, and I saw men stacking themselves upon each other’s shoulders to get to the top, like a wobbly tower of wedding chairs. Two men held their hands out for another and attempted to catapult him to the top, like clumsy cheerleaders.
The collectivist officials stationed at the top of the wall begged people to stop and either pushed off those who would force the issue or shot them in the shoulder. We were fifty yards away and kept advancing, despite the clear rejection waiting for us. The COM wall guards fired off enough rounds to clear out certain sections of the wall before they filled again with humans scaling. I pushed through with Solara and rounded the compound to the west side, where it faced a patch of woods. The gang was still closing in, but ignoring the COM compound in favor of a business park to the right that was also besieged. The gang bulldozed ahead, scouring its way through the living and the dead.
We touched the wall of the compound, and I looked up to see a guard manning his rifle and aiming it directly at my shoulder. I yelled to him. “Do you know who David Farrell is?”
“David Farrell?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “David Farrell.”
“Yeah.”
“I am David Farrell’s father. Can you help us?” I held up the ES license that was still dangling from my neck.
“You’re an ES, for shit’s sake.”
“I quit! I swear!”
He rolled his eyes and disappeared behind the perimeter for a moment. A car blew up about a block away and everyone recoiled.
“Think they’ll let us in?” Solara asked.
“I think they’re about to pour boiling oil on us.”
The guard reemerged and set his rifle on the wall. Discreetly, he dropped a crumpled ball of paper at my feet. I rushed to pick it up and backed away with Solara into the morass. Others tried to climb the wall and were turned away. Confident no one was looking, I opened the paper and we read the instructions to walk to a white Chevy plug-in, three hundred paces west and three hundred paces south. I looked at Solara with renewed hope. A temporary reprieve awaited us.
“We’re in,” I told her.
“Then let’s go.”
We turned around and found ourselves face-to-face with a short, bald, green man. Dressed entirely in black—shoes, socks, pants, belt, and a dirty long-sleeved tunic that looked like a formal jacket worn backward—he grinned at me maniacally, as if he had been waiting for me this whole time. A new and old face. I felt a tight pinch in my ribs and looked down to see the thick blade already burrowed to the hilt in my side. He pulled the knife out and I saw blood come spilling forth as if I’d been uncorked. He bared his hideous busted teeth and laughed shrilly.
“You look so funny right now,” he said.
Then he continued on his way, slashing indiscriminately through everyone else in front of us. Solara raised the shotgun and blasted at him. I saw a little eruption burst from his shoulder, as if a blasting cap had been planted inside. He hurtled forward, ripping and tearing, and soon the bodies swallowed our view of him entirely, leaving him to some undetermined fate best left to my bitterest imagination. I heard screams and cries, but everything inside me soon felt plugged up and I felt an immediate wave of lethargy and dropped to one knee.
Solara grabbed me and jerked me back up. “No you don’t.”
For three hundred paces west she dragged me through the woods, occasionally resting her body and mine against the backs of those pushing in front of us. We came to a rock and the pain in my side detonated. I writhed like the subject of an exorcism as my blood drained and my insides sparred with one other. Solara hooked my arm round her shoulder and began the slow gimp south to the plug-in. The people moving west knocked us off course, and I could feel her weakening as she tried to battle through them. Dust flew in my eyes, and I could barely see through the sheets of tears flowing out. I felt my right foot soaked and looked down to see my shoe drowning in red. I felt Solara’s grip coming loose, as if I were a boat sloppily tethered to its moorings. People flowed across and around us like snakes, and soon I was separated from her entirely and watched with bleary eyes as the undertow brought me down and the human rip currents swept her seemingly continents away. I cried out for her, but my pathetic yelps were no match for the collective’s incessant roar. I felt bodies tripping and falling on top of me, one after another until all the light was shut out and I was buried alive by the living. Thick blood oozed from my side, then stopped when I was forced to fold up like an accordion under the weight of the pileup. I tried squirming under the suffocating bodies but was locked in place.
Then I heard the shotgun. Third shot.
Solara was yelling. “Fucking get off of him! Get up!”
Fourth shot. The heap loosened.
“John!”
“Solara!”
Fifth shot. The bodies above began to wiggle, and I was free to bleed again. The pain dug in like Satan’s heel.
Sixth shot. I felt Solara’s hand grasp my shoulder and bring me back upright. I saw her face, and all I wanted in that moment was one free minute in one square yard of free space. That was all I wanted for the rest of this lifetime.
She dragged me to the Chevy plug-in. Four people were asleep inside, but Solara knew instinctively that the inside of the car was irrelevant. The Chevy was parked against the curb, beside an open storm drain, the gutter rich with blackened rainwater and piss and blood. She slammed me against the side of the plug-in, then let me slide down and tucked me halfway under the car. I looked into the drain and saw the guard from the COM compound peek up from inside. He beckoned to me. I began to roll toward the drain, and was under the car completely when I heard a gunshot.
Solara cried out in pain. I turned. She was twisting down beside the car like a weakly spun toy top, and I saw a pair of black motorcycle boots standing still beside her in the ongoing stampede. The shooter stepped on her back and rejoined the procession without a word, disappearing into the slipstream. I grabbed Solara and dragged her under the car, and there we lay, protected momentarily.
I looked at her face and saw she wasn’t gone. The bullet had entered her chest, and her cheap shirt became so overwhelmed with blood and grubby street sand that it appeared to have dissolved. I felt around her body and found that the bullet had exited cleanly out her back, just inside her shoulder blade. I pressed on the exit wound and kissed her on the cheek. I looked at her face and saw relief, as if she had unloaded a terrible burden once and for all.
She held up the shotgun and pushed it down to her feet. “No more shots.”
“We’re almost there,” I told her.
The guard was still waiting for us. I grabbed his hand with my left and cradled Solara in my right as he dragged us quietly into the gutter and we fell on top of him in the shallow, dark cavern below. He shined a flashlight in our faces. “You guys don’t look so good.”
“Leave me here if you need to,” I told him. “Just make sure she’s okay.”
“No,” he said. “Someone’s eager to meet you.”
I felt a strong set of arms wrap around my torso and pick me up, wringing out whatever little blood was left in my body. The long drag to the compound began. I looked to Solara. Another COM official had hoisted her up and was dragging her along. I stared at her feet as they scraped along the bottom of the sewer, then looked at her face and saw her smile knowingly. I felt royal for a moment, as if the man dragging me was my rickshaw driver. Then my guts churned and brought me back to reality. I began to sweat violently, and the guard had difficulty holding on. Every few feet he’d stop and hoist me back into his grasp. Meanwhile I felt like a boa was slowly working my insides out of me. Others ran past us in the tunnel, in both directions. Whether they were COM members or normal people looking for a way to anywhere, I don’t know.
I heard a door swing open and saw my feet being dragged into a clean hallway. The shine on the floor, bright and fierce as the first nuclear blast, made my eyeballs run to the back of my head. The arms holding me up loosened and gently laid me down on the floor, like an infant about to be changed. I looked over and saw Solara. She was still there. Still holding on. I began to pray. Not to any god or man. Just to the air. I silently asked that we both get just a little more time. Just the time we needed.
A stern-looking man with red hair, dressed in khakis and a denim shirt, came into view and knelt beside me.
“You’re John Farrell,” he said.
“I am.”
“I’m the Reverend Samuel Jeffs. I’m sorry to tell you this, but we have no doctors available.”
“She’s pregnant.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? How long?”
Solara strained, “John, don’t . . .”
“Fourteen weeks,” I told him.
The reverend leaned back and scratched his chin. He signaled to a man passing by. He pointed to Solara as he yelled at the man, “Chuck! A doctor for this one.”
I heard Chuck run to get a doctor. Solara reached out a hand and brushed it against my side. I felt disinfected.
“There is something I want to tell you, Mr. Farrell,” said Jeffs. “Your son saved your life. I don’t know if you realize that. For twenty years, our chapter in NoVa has watched you. Monitored you. Watched you kill untold numbers of people, make untold violations of the human vessel. These were mortal sins, and we were primed to punish you for it. The Reverend Steve Swanson told me he had many times been on the verge of taking you away somewhere very deep and dark. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“But he didn’t do it. Do you know why he didn’t?”
I did. “David.” I said his name like I was trapped awake at 4:00 A.M. in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere.
“That’s right,” he said. “Your son was a hero. He died for his fellow men. And his memory bought you the past twenty years of your life. You never would have gotten to live them otherwise. Think of that gift. You’re a very blessed man, and I thought you would like to know that. You raised a wonderful boy.”
I turned away from the reverend in shame. He handed me a bottle of water, and I thanked him and took a sip, though I knew I was unworthy of it. I looked to Solara and saw her shivering. I turned to the reverend urgently and coughed out the words, “Marry us.”
“What?”
“Please marry us.”
He looked at both of us with surprise, and then amusement. “Of course.” He rose to his feet and assumed a formal air, as if standing upon an altar. “By the power vested in me by the State of Virginia, and with man as my witness, you are now husband and wife. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” we said to him.
He knelt back down beside me. “I have to go back upstairs and make sure this church isn’t destroyed. I’m sure you understand. The doctor will be down here shortly for your wife. Rest here, for now. I can’t promise you’ll be undisturbed, but hopefully this will be the time you need.”
I thanked him a final time. A pair of hands dragged me to the wall and propped me against it. I grabbed at my side, and it was sticky with coagulating blood. I bunched together the fingers on my left hand, then tried to see if I could separate them. I couldn’t. They put Solara next to me and joined our hands. I looked to the floor and saw parallel trails forged in blood. Above us the hard progression of humanity continued, impossible to deter. She rested against me and leaned into my body because she hadn’t the strength to prevent it. I could feel my body slipping down to the right, and there on the floor we settled, Solara on top of me, watching our blood intermingle and collect amongst the filth. She kissed my bloodied ear.
“Only you can hear this,” she whispered. “This is ours and no one else can find it.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t let me down, John. You were right. They couldn’t hurt us. I’ve been looking for the right man to do this with. You were a good man for the job. Everything’s gonna be all right now. I’m not leaving you.”
I shook my head. “No. No. You have to go. You have to run from me again.”
“No, I’m done.”
“You’re not,” I told her. “You get a chance to keep on going, you take it. You keep on living. That’s how it works. Because you don’t know what’s coming.”
She began to cry. She sounded like she wanted to go to sleep and never be disturbed again. “I don’t wanna know anymore.”
“God, I never saw you coming, Solara. And that’s what makes you so fucking perfect. Please, Solara. You have to go.”
“I won’t.”
“Please. In the past eighty-nine years, these four days are the only thing I got right. Don’t let this all be for nothing.”
She let out a sigh and nodded consent. A doctor came and stood at our feet. He took her vitals and told her, “I think we can do something for you, Mrs. Farrell.” He stepped away. I kissed her a final time.
“I love you, Solara.”
She buried her head in my neck. “It feels new when you say it.”
The doctor dragged her away, and she didn’t bother trying to resist. I turned and saw her fading down the hallway. I willed myself to envision a perfect future for her and her child—one I knew couldn’t possibly exist. But I could see it anyway. I could see the wonderful things we all want to see when we first set out down the road. I saw that, and the promise of it was all I needed. She was flawless, forever.
The ground pulsed a third time.
I once met a traveler who told me he would live to see the end of time. He laid out all his vitamins before me and told me he slept seven hours every night, no more or less. All the life you want, he said. It’s all within the palm of your hand now. He said he would outlast all the wars and all the diseases, long enough to remember everything, and long enough to forget everything. He’d be the last man still standing when the sun decides to collapse upon itself and history ends. He said he had found the safest place on earth, where he could stay until the gateway to the beyond opened before him. A thousand generations from today. I pictured him there, atop a remote and snowy mountain. The heavens opening and God congratulating him for his perseverance. Asking him to join Him and watch as the sun burns down to a dull orange cinder and everything around it breaks its orbit and goes tumbling, tumbling away, everything that once seemed permanent pulled apart effortlessly, like a ball of yarn. A life into divinity.