Page 57 of One Adult, Please

"I've been redirecting them. The aviary birds are loud. Especially the macaws. When the infected cluster near the rescue center, I open the aviary vents and the bird calls draw them east, toward the far perimeter. It gives me a window to move through the zone. Usually twenty to thirty minutes before they drift back."

"You've been using birds as zombie bait," Beck says.

"I've been using auditory stimuli to exploit predictable behavioral responses in…"

"Zombie bird bait. That's genius. You've been doing zombie bird bait this whole time and we've been using ride cars and axes like amateurs."

I don't correct him. The description is reductive but not inaccurate.

"Can we use the same principle today?" Joel asks. "Draw them away from the buildings, and clear the buildings while they're clustered elsewhere?"

"I have something better than the aviary vents." I look at Captain, who's perched on the stand I wedged beside the porthole, tearing apart a strip of chicken I packed from the rescue center’s frozen supply. "Captain can fly. He's non-releasable because of the eye, not because he can't fly. He's trained to return to the glove."

"You want to use Captain as an air unit," Grace says.

"I want to use Captain as a mobile auditory stimulus. If I send him to a perch point near the east perimeter, his vocalizations will draw the infected away from the central buildings and keep them clustered while we work."

Grace looks at Captain. "Captain is about to be deployed as an air-based zombie herding system. He's a tactical angry pirate bird. That's his rank now. He's been promoted."

Captain screams. I choose to interpret it as acknowledgment rather than protest, although with Captain, the distinction is largely academic.

I feed Pepper before we leave and settle her into the insulated travel pouch in the thinking box. Joel connects the heating pad to one of the ride batteries. She’ll be warm, secure, and asleep until her next bottle. We’ll be back before then.

We arrive in Wonder Garden on a Sunday morning that feels like a Monday that feels like the forty-seventh day of a week that started Thursday.

I release Captain from the glove. The recall whistle hangs around my neck. He launches, a burst of brown and auburn feathers, and climbs in a tight spiral above Wonder Garden. He reaches the east perimeter, finds the tall lamppost near the park wall, and lands.

And screams.

The scream cuts through the air. It's the kind of sound that evolution designed to carry across valleys and open terrain. It bounces off the park walls and echoes through the botanical gardens and every infected in Wonder Garden responds.

From our position near the butterfly pavilion, I see four of them in the garden paths, two near the restaurant, one by the gift shop entrance.

Their heads turn. All of them. Simultaneously. They move toward Captain. Toward the east perimeter.

"It's working," Grace whispers. She's crouched beside me behind a garden wall, friendship paddle across her knees, the foam trident strapped to her tote bag.

"We have maybe twenty minutes," I say.

"Twenty minutes. Three buildings." Grace counts on her fingers. "Six minutes each, with two minutes left for regret."

"That's not a lot of time," Joel says.

"Then we're fast. Beck, you take the restaurant. Joel, you take the gift shop. Grant and I take the butterfly pavilion. We seal, we move, we meet at the petting zoo," she says.

"Why are you with Grant?" Joel asks, and there's something in his voice, not jealousy exactly but adjacent, a territorial marker placed quietly.

"Because Grant has the sleepy stick and I have the friendship paddle and that's two weapons which is more than one weapon which is math, Joel."

Joel's jaw tightens. Beck watches the micro-response. I watch Beck watch.

"Go," Grace says.

Joel hands each team a maintenance radio. “Channel three. Check in when your building is secured. If you lose contact or the infected start drifting, retreat to the petting zoo. Nobody improvises a rescue alone.”

Beck looks personally targeted by the last sentence.

Joel and Beck split toward their targets, moving fast, Joel with mechanical precision and Beck with kinetic enthusiasm. Grace and I head for the butterfly pavilion.