He continued his search for Philip.
He came around the corner with some of his men. When a door opened, he stopped and was about to shoot when he saw it was Conrad and a living child.
“Hold!” Harper shouted. He motioned for the half dozen people with him to continue on. When they rounded the corner, starting up a new cacophony of gunfire, he shouted to Conrad, “Fate brings us together again.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Time will tell. Have you seen Philip?”
“A few minutes ago. I tried to take him down.”
Harper smiled. “Good for you.” He glanced at the living child. “I take it this is your son.”
Conrad nodded.
Harper held out his gloved hand to the boy. “I’m Harper.”
The boy just stared at the hand, his bottom lip trembling.
Conrad said, “Where’s Gabriel?”
“Three floors down. That’s where all the prisoners are being held. My people are there now.”
“Can you watch my son?”
“I’m not a babysitter, Conrad.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and took off down the hallway.
At that moment
Harper’s man in the Communications Room was under attack. He had locked the door and barred it with a desk. The Hunters had already destroyed the lock with their gunfire but found the desk an obstacle. Now they were pushing, pushing, and the young rookie knew that soon the door would give in. But he couldn’t let that happen. Not yet. There was still more Harper needed done, more to the plan that—
A bullet caught him in the shoulder, another in the head.
He fell down expired on the keyboard.
Hunters swarmed in. They pushed the rookie away, and while a few kicked and spat at his body, another sat down in the chair and started typing at the keyboard, ready to right all that had been made wrong.
Left suddenly alone
with the boy, Harper didn’t know what to do. Helpless, he looked down at the boy and saw fear in the boy’s eyes—something he had seen much too often before in other living children—and he wanted to say something, something that would put the gunfire and the alarm out of this boy’s mind.
Then suddenly the alarm stopped.
And Harper knew his contact has just been expired.
At once Conrad appeared around the corner. “Thank you,” he said, and to Harper he looked worse than ever before, the man decaying very rapidly now.
Harper didn’t say anything. He didn’t know why, but there was something about the man now he didn’t like. Something he didn’t trust. And it didn’t help that the man’s son was looking at him strangely.
So he turned away without a word and continued toward the sound of gunfire. He left Conrad and his son, both who turned away and hurried down the hall, to the stairs.
Philip was not
happy. Things should not be going this way. He should not be cornered in a room with a number of his men, waiting for whoever it was that had decided to crash this party to come in and expire them. So he told his men he wanted their rifles. He told them he wanted their rifles now. His men relented, giving him their rifles. He said that if they were true Hunters, they would use their broadswords to fight. One of them began to protest. Philip shot him in the head. He said, “Anyone else have a problem with that?” None did. They charged out into the hallway, their swords held high above their heads. A spray of bullets took them down. Philip waited a moment. He waited a moment for a lull in the gunfire. Then he emerged. He came out and fired at his enemy, aiming for their heads. He hit most of them. He got hit a few times too. But he didn’t slow. He never slowed. He had never slowed a day in his existence and that was why he had gotten so far, why he was now the Hunter General, why he was now at the top of the world’s tallest building, even if it had become overrun by living extremists. Fucking living extremists, the real problem with this world. Bad enough there were the living, but then there were the dead that thought there was nothing wrong with the living. Philip used this to keep him going, even when he was hit. He shot and reloaded and shot until all the men and women left standing were down. He walked around and finished them off. He came to one man, a man with a beard, who said, “You—” but Philip shot him in the head. When he was satisfied, he found a phone and got in contact with one of his men on the first floor. “I don’t want excuses,” he said. “I don’t want to hear you say you can’t do something. Understood?” When the man said yes, Philip said, “Good. Then make sure Conrad and his son do not leave this building. They’re mine.”
A man with
a gun was waiting in the stairwell. He had heard them and was ready for them, his gun aimed, so that the moment they showed themselves he would open fire. He saw Conrad first and he saw the broadsword and he was about to shoot but then hesitated when he saw Kyle. He shouted, “Stop!” and then stared up at Kyle, asked him if he was okay.
“This is my dad,” Kyle said, his voice quiet and shaky. “Please don’t expire him.”
The man lowered the gun. He asked what was going on.
Conrad said, “I just talked to Harper. He said you’re working on getting the prisoners.”
The man nodded dumbly.
“I’m looking for a man named Gabriel.”
The man hesitated again, then stepped aside and opened the door and motioned them in.
Conrad went first, followed by Kyle, and there they saw the same kind of destruction as on the top floor. Most of the bodies on the ground were those of expired Hunters, but some were also of the men and women who had come to fight with Harper. The man who had almost shot them called to someone, told her to take care of Conrad and Kyle.
She looked at them, her black eyes staying a little too long on Conrad’s broadsword. “What do you want?”
Conrad told her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I know exactly who you mean. He’s the only one that refuses to leave.”
“Show me.”
She led them down the hallway to an opened door, looked hard at Conrad and said, “Good luck.”
Conrad stepped into the room. Gabriel was hunched in the corner, his knees pulled up to his chest, his head lowered.
“Gabriel.”
The zombie looked up slowly, as if awakening from a deep sleep. His face was the palest Conrad had ever seen it.
“Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”
Gabriel stared at him a long moment before slowly shaking his head. “You asked me before what’s so great about being alive? Well, the answer is nothing. Pain—who wants to feel pain? I’m … I’m in so much pain right now. It makes me … it makes me dizzy. It makes me … want to die.”
Conrad left Kyle where he was and walked over to crouch down in front of the zombie. He grabbed Gabriel’s arms and shook him. “We’re leaving here now. So stand up.”
Gabriel shook his head, tried to pull his arms away. “Leave me alone. Let me die in peace.”
“Do you see my son back there? He’s living now. I intend to keep him that way. And I owe you for saving me before.”
“Leave me alone and we’ll consider it even.”
Conrad grabbed Gabriel’s arms again and pulled him to his feet. Gabriel cried out as the wounds in his arms were squeezed and his leg was jerked up. But then the zombie was standing and Conrad had a firm hold and he stared straight into Gabriel’s face.
“Ready?” he asked.
Gabriel turned his head away and threw up on the floor.
Back out in the hallway a minute later, pulling Gabriel along with Kyle behind him, Conrad spotted an expired body with an assault rifle. He paused to pick the rifle up. He checked the cartridge and saw there were still plenty of rounds left. He looked around to see if anyone cared but it seemed most of Harper’s people were preoccupied with getting all of Philip’s prisoners gathered, trying to figure out a way to get them all out of the building safely. One of them kept speaking into a radio, saying Harper’s name over and over, only getting static in reply.
Conrad directed them back toward the stairs. The man with the gun who’d been there before was now gone. They started down the steps, going around and around, and went only five more flights before Conrad realized they couldn’t possibly go the entire way. Not only was it over one hundred more flights, but there was no guessing who might be hiding around any corner.
So he picked the first door and opened it and immediately aimed his rifle, ready to shoot whoever stood on the other side. But the floor appeared empty. It was silent and dark, lit only by emergency lights. They entered quietly, Conrad now confident Gabriel could stand and walk on his own.
They went to the elevators. Conrad pressed the down button. They waited. A minute passed, another, and Conrad kept pressing the button. Finally there was a ding and one of the lights above the elevator doors lit up and he turned just as the doors opened and saw the Hunters inside, four of them. They were confused as to the sudden stop and saw him too. They went to raise their weapons but Conrad raised his first. He opened fire. He hurried forward and continued shooting until only one Hunter was still animated, and by then Conrad was in the elevator and had grabbed another Hunter’s rifle and used it to finish the job.
It took another minute to get the expired bodies off the elevator. Conrad then took two of their rifles, kept one and gave the other to Gabriel.
He pressed the button for the lobby, the doors closed, and then they were headed down.
After about ten seconds of silence, Gabriel spoke.
“Remember what I said about pain? I’ve never felt so much. And after they put me in that room and turned out the lights, all I could do was cry and think. And I started thinking about pain. I asked myself, just what is it. I mean, is it something I actually
feel
, or is it something I know is there and because I know it’s there my mind tells me it should hurt, so it hurts.”
They passed the seventy-fifth floor.
“So I started thinking about emotions. I started thinking about imagination. All the things you and the rest of the dead don’t have. And I asked myself, is that even true? Or maybe … well, maybe you’ve just been told all your existence you don’t have those things, so that’s what you believe. You just accept it as fact and because they don’t exist in your mind, they somehow don’t exist at all.”
They passed the fiftieth floor.
“I mean, you wonder about things, don’t you? You think about how certain things could turn out, all the different outcomes … right? Does any of this make sense? Any of it?”
Conrad didn’t answer. He stood facing the two metal doors and watched the numbers as they descended. He was for some reason reminded of the elevator at Living Intelligence he’d first ridden with Norman, and all the things he had learned there. And he thought about dominos and ripples and how if maybe he had never gotten into that elevator, he and Kyle and Gabriel would not be in this elevator right now, the numbers counting down—ten … nine … eight—and he wouldn’t be forced to think about everything Gabriel had just said to him.
The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors opened and immediately they heard the gunfire in the lobby, saw the smoke, saw people running around shooting at each other.
Conrad hit the CLOSE DOORS button.
The doors closed and there was a heavy moment of silence where only the echoes of the gunfire could be heard.
“Now what?” Gabriel asked.
Conrad kept staring at the panel of numbers. His gaze had focused on the two under the lobby button: B and SB.
“Conrad? Now what do we do?”
“Now we try our only other option.” He pressed SB. “The Labyrinth.”
Denise drove by
the house twice—the first time noticing the destruction, the second time trying to make sense of it—before she pulled into the driveway. She knew she should leave at once, that she should return to the Meadowland Inn, apologize, act like she never left in the first place, but once the car was parked she turned off the ignition and extracted the key.
She looked down at the puppy on the passenger seat, the puppy looking back at her, and said, “Stay.”
Then she was out of the car, heading up the walkway, doing her best to ignore the dark holes in the outside of the house, the shattered glass, the tears in the front lawn. The door was ajar and she approached it slowly, remembering what she thought before, that this was now a stranger’s house and would always be a stranger’s house.
She stepped up onto the porch. She had the strange impulse to knock, ring the doorbell, call hello. Instead she placed her fingers against the door, gently pushed it open. Its hinges squeaked.
Stepping into darkness, she reached for the switch on the wall and flicked it on. Nothing happened. She flicked it again. Still nothing.
There were flashlights in the kitchen, in one of the drawers, and she started down the hallway, taking her time as she stepped over plaster, over pieces of broken wood and glass. There was some light coming from the kitchen, some moonlight streaming through the patio door and the windows, and she focused on that light, letting it lead her, allowing its sharp glow to wrap its hand around her hand and gently pull her forward.
Her eyes having already adjusted to the dark, she could make out the destruction here without much trouble: the tipped over chairs, the cabinet doors hanging open, the plates and bowls and glasses on the floor, some broken, some not.
She went to the counter, opened the first drawer, began rummaging through it. In the very back she found the flashlight, a cheap plastic thing, and she pulled it out, pressed the rubber button to turn on the light.
The beam was small but bright, and she surveyed the damage with even more scrutiny. Noticing the toaster oven on the floor, the door to the microwave completely shattered, she found herself thinking about the vase she always used for Conrad’s flowers and swung the light to the kitchen table.