She keeps her eyes locked on his, unable to speak, but her legs firm up under her and she follows.
“Hey!” Nora shouts and I see her knuckles gripping the window bars. “Let them go, you piece of shit, they can’t help you! I’m the Nurse of the Living Dead, they call me Queen Greene! If anyone can control them, it’s me!”
“Is she your friend?” Perry asks Julie.
“Who are you?” Julie whispers, still staring into his eyes. “Who are you?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “She’s our friend.”
Perry unlocks Nora’s cell. Nora emerges, sees his face, and freezes. “Holy shit, you look—”
The distant clang of a hammer striking a door latch.
“Introductions later,” Perry says. “Follow me.”
He runs down the hall but the women are stunned, immobile.
“Who is that?” Julie asks me with fear in her voice.
“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” I grab her hand. “We’re getting out of here.”
She glances at Nora, then at me, then at the ghost waiting for us at the end of the hall. We run.
WITH EVERY DOOR we burst through, I expect to be greeted by daylight, but each time it’s another hall, another chamber, another door. The professionally poured concrete of the inner wall gives way to the rushed corner-cutting of post-apocalyptic construction: mouldy drywall, rusty sheet metal, and the ever-present plywood. I don’t remember any building this large in Citi Stadium. I begin to suspect we are elsewhere.
The lighting in these outer chambers is more reliable, and I catch glimpses of Perry’s face as we chase him through this badly built labyrinth. He’s not Perry, of course. How could he be Perry? I personally consumed that man’s brain and watched my brethren take his body home in several choice cuts. And then he stowed away in the back of my head, filling in for my absent conscience, and we worked together to repair our souls. I cheered him on into “whatever’s next.” Perry Kelvin and I made peace and parted ways—this man is not him. He is older, thicker, his jaw more pronounced, his skin more weathered. I think Julie and Nora see this too, but the resemblance still shocks them into uncharacteristic silence.
A door with a glowing window appears. I nearly salivate at the thought of daylight. After three days in this chilly hole of pain and darkness, my skin will drink in the sun like sweet tea. The man who is not Perry holds the door for us and we emerge into—not daylight. A pale streetlamp lighting a dark corner. Overhead: a suffocating sky of water-stained concrete.
“Welcome to Goldman Dome,” Not-Perry says. “Keep moving.”
Unlike Citi Stadium, this place makes no attempt to mimic the layout of a real city. No miniature high-rises jutting into open space. No open space at all—Goldman’s “architects” appear to have filled every cubic foot of the dome with structures, all merging into one crooked, creaking mass that extends from the ground to the distant curve of the ceiling. The street we’re on appears to be the only exterior path, cutting a line through the grotesque honeycomb from one end of the dome to the other. Pedestrians peer down at us from the web of dizzying catwalks that connect the two halves of the hive.
But no alarm. No floodlights. No arrest orders barking from a Jumbotron.
“They sent me to bring you in for another interview,” Not-Perry says as he leads us down the street toward a row of sunken parking spots like the garage of a cheap apartment complex. “I took their walkies and locked them in their office, but they’ll get out and call it in and the dome will shut down. We’ve got maybe five minutes.”
He unlocks one of the pickup trucks—a beat-up old Ford with a grey primer paint job and a well-stocked gun rack. Julie starts to open the passenger door but Not-Perry holds out his hand. “No. All of you get in the bed.”
“Why?” Nora says.
“There’s some rope back there. Tie your wrists and pretend you’re zombies.”
“God damn it!” Julie suddenly shouts, snapping out of her trance. “Who are you?”
He sees the flinty glint in her eyes and realises she has reached her limit. She won’t be going anywhere until she gets an answer. “Abram Kelvin,” he says. “I’m Perry’s brother.”
Julie stares at him, eyes flicking over his features, scanning. “Perry didn’t have a—”
“Look, I told you my name, we really don’t have time for the rest of this chat right now. Get in the fucking truck.”
He hops in and slams the door. I climb into the bed and after a moment the women follow me. We wrap the rope around our wrists in a few loose coils and lie down on the rusty metal like bundles of firewood. I am the only one who’s particularly pale, but their abundance of clotted wounds and bruises make up for their lack of pallor. In this dim underworld light, they’ll pass.
The truck lurches out of the garage and I watch the dome’s upper reaches scroll past me. A guard on one of the lower catwalks looks down, sees the truck’s cargo, and spits. His sickly green phlegm splats an inch from my ear.
“Almost there,” Abram calls back to us through the rear window. “Shut up and be Dead.”
I turn to face Julie. Our eyes are inches apart as our heads bounce against the truck. I wonder if she remembers what I taught her about zombie mimicry on our first foray into the airport, ages ago when life was simple, just me and her and a few comical corpses.