Cassie, do you want to fly?
The green pill fell out when I ripped myself from the Wonderland chair, and I picked it up without thinking about it, without even looking at it. Then I saw Ringer lying in that hallway and I remembered we’d swapped jackets. She’d been carrying around the bomb the whole time and didn’t tell anyone. I think I know why. I know her as well as she knows herself. Better, even, because I can remember what she’s forgotten.
I press Vosch’s severed thumb against the launch button. The hatch door closes, the locking mechanism hums. The ventilation system kicks on; cool air brushes against my cheek.
The pod shivers. I feel like raising my hands.
Yes, Daddy, I want to fly.
ZOMBIE
I LOSE THE KIDS when we hit the water. The force of our landing snatches them away. The chopper tumbles into the river several hundred yards upstream and the fireball paints the surface a dusky orange. I see Megan first, her face breaking the surface enough to allow her a gurgling scream. I grab her wrist and yank her toward me.
“Captain!” she yells.
Huh?
“I lost Captain!”
She kicks against my legs, reaching with her free hand toward the teddy bear that spins lazily away from us. Oh Christ. That damned bear.
I look over my shoulder. Nugget, where are you? Then I see him at the shoreline, half in, half out, back arching as he coughs up a gallon of river water. The kid is truly indestructible.
“Okay, Megan. Climb aboard; I’ll get him.”
She hitches herself onto my back, wrapping her thin arms around my neck and her stick legs around my torso. I kick over to the bear. Gotcha. Then the long swim to shore, which isn’t that far, but the water’s freezing and Megan on my back bears me down.
Bears me down. That’s a good one.
We collapse on the shore beside Nugget. Nobody speaks for a few minutes. Then Nugget goes, “Zombie?”
“Somebody hit the kill switch. Only thing that makes sense, Private.”
“Corporal,” he corrects me. Then he says, “Ringer?”
I nod. “Ringer.”
He processes for a second. Then, his voice shaking because he’s afraid to ask: “Cassie?”
CASSIE
THE HAND OF GOD slams down as the pod explodes up the launch shaft, a massive fist flattens my body into the chair, and then the fist closes around me, squeezing. Some wiseass has dropped a two-ton rock on my chest and I’m finding it very difficult to breathe. Also, somebody with no regard whatsoever for my comfort and safety has turned off all the lights—I can’t even see the eerie green glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Either that or my eyes have been shoved to the back of my skull.
ZOMBIE
NO, NUGGET. She probably didn’t make it. Before I can say the words, Megan slaps my chest and points toward the base. A shining ball of green light shoots over the treetops into the rose-colored sky. The afterimage lingers in our eyes long after it’s lost in the atmosphere.
“It’s a shooting star!” she says.
I shake my head. “Wrong direction.”
I guess, in the end, I was wrong.
CASSIE
THE FEELING OF being slowly crushed to death in total darkness lasts for several minutes. In other words, forever. Okay, forever is one word.
A word we throw around like we can even grasp it, like forever is something the human mind can comprehend.