Falconer asked, “The Soy Sauce, was it in the house when it burned?”

“No. I’ll show you.”

John was afraid Falconer would say, “Great, I’ll wait here!” but instead Falconer led the way, striding into Dave’s yard like a man with a huge gun. Falconer glanced this way and that, alert but not scared. John followed and made his way around the yard to find the toolshed hadn’t burned. It was also still unlocked from when he’d grabbed the chainsaw the day everything went to shit. He reached inside and grabbed a shovel. He tossed it to Falconer.

“The sauce is in a little silver container, about the size of a spool of thread. Inside is a really thick, black liquid. When we find it, don’t open it. Not only will the shit kill you if it gets on your skin, but it will come after you. Have you seen The Blob? It’s like that. Only tiny.”

“And when you say it will kill ‘you,’ you mean ‘me.’ Because you can handle it for some reason.”

“Yes. You’ll see.”

“Uh huh. And judging from the shovel, I assume you buried it?”

“Yeah, around here somewhere. Don’t look at me that way, I need you to do the digging, you’ll see why. It’s not deep. Now, the container is somewhere here in the backyard. I know where. But I’m not going to tell you. I want you to walk to a random spot—what you think is a random spot, anyway—and dig down about a foot.”

Falconer didn’t move from where he was standing. He plunged the shovel into the dirt right in front of his feet. Three scoops and then—

“Look. Right there.”

Falconer looked down, and in the moonlight saw the glint of brushed steel, poking out from the mud. “All right, how did you do that?”

“I didn’t. It did. The Sauce. When we buried it, Dave just threw the shovel like a javelin and said wherever it landed, that’s where we’d bury it. That’s where it landed. Where you’re standing. Because the Soy Sauce wanted it to land there. Because it knew you would be standing there a year later.”

“‘It’ knew. So the Sauce is alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now you’re going to swallow some of it.”

“That’s the least painful way, yeah.”

“And you have no idea how it does what it does.”

“Let’s just say it’s magic.”

“Let’s just say that I need a little more explanation than that if I’m going to go along with this.”

John sighed. “Okay, have you heard of nanotechnology?”

“Yeah. Microscopic robots, right?”

“Right, and imagine they can make millions of these robots and embed them in a liquid, so that you now have a liquid infused with the power of all these machines. Got it?”

“All right.”

“Now imagine if, instead of tiny robots, it’s magic.”

John dug the bottle from the mud with his fingers.

“Stand back.”

“If you take that shit and you go into a seizure or cardiac arrest, I’m leavin’ you here.”

“Detective, if I take this shit and it looks like the trip is going bad, fucking run.”

John squeezed the bottle in his hand. He thought he heard the footsteps again, but decided he needed to stop falling for that at some point. He took a deep breath, and said, “All right. Here goes.”

2 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was rumbling through the night in a crowded RV, heading south, scared out of her mind. Her head was between her knees, staring at the filthy floor and praying silently, as had been her habit since she’d been a toddler. She had realized she was doing it out of reflex. If God was the type who needed to be asked verbally before he would support your side over man-eating monsters, then she wasn’t sure what good he would be once he joined. She hadn’t been to Mass since her brother Jim was alive. Her faith could be summed up in two sentences, from one of the Narnia books. Speaking about Aslan, the lion that symbolized Jesus, a character says:

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Amy hated—hated—the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so slow to actually do anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don’t need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God—maybe the only thing—is that he favors those who act. David also believed that, though he didn’t realize it.

Guns were clicking all around her. The zombie nerds were pushing all variety of bullets into all varieties of gun parts. Long, gleaming brass bullets, bright red shotgun shells. Guns designed with the elegant lines of sports cars, slick oiled metal and curved textured plastic meant to fit right into your hand. Josh rammed a lever forward on his and it clicked satisfyingly into place. Don’t get her wrong, she saw the appeal. She also saw how you could start thinking of them as toys.

Josh held up a blood red shotgun shell and said, “Dragon’s Breath. Zirconium-based incendiary pellets, looks like a flamethrower every time you pull the trigger. This is an automatic shotgun with a twenty-round drum. Three more drums in my backpack. We get in a jam, this thing will unleash a wall of hellfire, as fast as I can pull the trigger.” He clicked shells into a plastic drum the size of a large saucepan and said, “These shells are fifteen dollars apiece, by the way.”

And there it was. She suddenly realized that she’d rather have David or John, either one, armed with a baseball bat, than any of these guys and their video game hardware. David and John had a look in their eye when things went bad—a sad but resigned familiarity. They weren’t trained for violence and maybe weren’t particularly competent at it, but they weren’t going to go pee in the corner, either. Both of them had come from bad homes, both had gotten hit quite a bit as kids and maybe that’s all it was. Maybe they just understood something about the world and were more ready for it when things took a turn. She didn’t see that look in any of these suburban kids.

A couple of months ago, Amy had come to stay with David over the long Labor Day weekend. At around midnight on Friday night, a crazy guy started showing up. He knocked on the door and said he had a pizza—they hadn’t ordered one—and he handed them this filthy pizza box, like something he’d dug out of the trash. David opened it and it had dog poop in it. They called the police, but the guy was gone when they got there. The guy came back, Saturday night. This time the old pizza box had a dead squirrel in it. David threatened the guy, slammed the door in his face. The guy comes back at two in the morning, another pizza box. David doesn’t even answer the door, just calls the police again. Again, no sign of the guy when they get there.

At around 7 P.M. on Sunday, the crazy guy starts showing up once an hour. If they didn’t answer, he’d stand there and ring the doorbell, over and over and over. The third time, David goes to the door and this time the guy says something to David, through the closed door. Whatever he said, it made David open the door. They exchanged low, heated words, and the guy leaves a pizza box on the porch and walks away. David looked inside, closed it, and threw it in the trash barrel outside. He wouldn’t tell Amy what was inside. As the man drove away David yelled, “You ever come within a hundred feet of her again, and I’m gonna tear your throat out with my teeth.” Only there were a lot more curse words.

But the guy did come back. At three in the morning. To their bedroom window. They were both fast asleep and Amy slowly woke up and heard whispering, a foot from her head. And it’s the crazy guy, whispering her name, over and over.

She screamed. David sprang out of bed, grabbed that ridiculous crossbow that John bought him at a gun show, and charged out of the house.

David shoots the pizza guy in the chest and the guy goes down, screaming. But then comes the twist—the guy is carrying a fresh pizza, from a local twenty-four-hour pizza place in town. He works for them. The guy is wearing a clean, new uniform, he looks totally sane and acts completely shocked that he got attacked by a customer. The pizza was for a house down the street. He said he just went to the wrong door.

After all of the legal craziness, with charges filed by the guy and talk of a civil suit for his medical bills, Amy asked David what they’d do if the guy came back some night, in crazy mode. David’s answer? “I hit him someplace where I know it’ll be fatal.”

And he would. Even if it meant jail. He would do it for her.

A kid in the back was trying on a pair of night-vision goggles. There were eight people packed into the RV. Fredo was driving. About 150 people counted themselves among the Zombie Response Squad when the wave of zombie panic hit the university. Seven answered the call when it came time to actually meet the threat—all of them piled in the RV with Amy, clacking the mechanisms on their guns.

Amy was scared out of her mind. But she would push through the fear and finish this. And she would have to hope the men sitting around her would do the same. Amy had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy four times, and was starting on her fifth. There was a bit she had memorized when the Ents were marching off to war against seemingly impossible odds (all odds probably seemed against you when you were a big ridiculous walking tree). It was running through her head now and would keep looping from now until they arrived at Undisclosed:

“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends, that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.”

Yes, Amy had long ago made peace with the fact that she was a huge, flaming nerd.

Soy Sauce

John twisted the silver bottle. It separated in the middle, along a seam that was invisible when it was closed. He didn’t open it all the way—he’d learned that wasn’t always wise if the Soy Sauce was “awake.”