Page 114 of Doomsdate

“Are they in?” Maisie swerves to avoid crashing into a smaller swarm racing toward the water. “Are they still moving?!”

I squint, then crane my neck, but finally I see their bulky arms flashing as they wade deeper into the water. “Yes! The suits are working!”

I’ll admit that when my sister attempted to explain what a Faraday cage is and how it protects the person within from electrical current passing around them, I was more than a little lost, but the important thing is that she was, as always, completely, obnoxiously right. She swore up and down that astronaut suits are built to be Faraday cages to protect the astronauts within from harmful space radiation, and that if we belted our parents into the ones Maisie and I stole, Mom and Dad would somehow magically survive entering a reservoir amped to high heaven.

I clearly had issues believing this, but she was right. Fucking overachiever. Chemistry and virology aren’t enough, she has to understand physics, too?

Grinning, I mash the walkie-talkie button. “Gemma, you asshole. I’m so proud of you!”

“Told you I was right,” her voice crackles back, smug as ever. “Give me a visual.”

“They’re headed toward the middle of the reservoir, almost up to their necks now.” I lift the binoculars Gemma stashed in our car for this purpose. “I can see their helmets.”

“And the zombies?”

“They’re following them in, just like we planned. The electrified water isn’t up to their hearts yet.”

Please, god. Let this work.

I watch my parents, my intense, courageous, completely impossible parents, who are apparently the presidents of this country now, go as deep as they can in the heavy, ungainly suits. If the seals break, if water rushes in, will the Faraday cages be breached? Will they be electrocuted, too? Or will the batteries fueling the electrified plow fizzle out, leaving my parents stranded in heavy space suits in the middle of a reservoir while starving zombies thrash toward them?

The reservoir is filled with snarling bodies. The town had already stopped using it for the water supply years ago after a bad contamination, and if our plan tonight works, it’ll never be usable again.

Mom and Dad reach the maintenance platform in the middle of the reservoir. It pitches unsteadily as they try, and fail, to hoist themselves up. Glowing eyes stream toward them.

But then a zombie’s body launches into the air, flopping like a fish. Mom scrabbles up the platform’s ladder, water pouring off the suit. Dad gives her ass a final shove up, then climbs up, too.

All around them, the dead begin to pop and float. Bobbing up to the surface, their already decomposing bodies full of buoyant gas.

“It’s working!” I yell into the walkie-talkie. “The electrified water’s reached the zombies’ hearts!”

Mom and Dad embrace, side by side, and raise their hands in tandem. They wave goodbye as we pass the last of the athletic fields and rip through the Stony Lonesome Gate out onto the clear, dark country roads.

They’re safe for now, and somehow, so are we.

Chapter Twenty-four

Maisie

I know how to worry. I grew up surrounded by fear and trained to anticipate every possible disaster, every worst outcome. Born into Mom’s homespun religion whose fundamental belief was that if you kept your eyes wide open and hunting for every horror, they wouldn’t, couldn’t sneak up on you.

Well, that was a load of horseshit.

Nothing could have prepared me for this drive. Stretches of silent, empty road, suddenly swarmed. My pulse would finally begin to slow, then a body would hurl itself at my window. A zombie bear bouncing off our plow. Over and over, the terrifying night dunks my brain in cortisol and adrenaline. Everett hasn’t stopped trembling. Chicken sits alert in his lap, a low, guttural growl burbling in her throat without end.

The barren country roads weave through sparsely populated farmlands on the way to Gramps’s bunker. We bypass small towns, steer clear of residential areas. There are fewer undead here, but the ones we find are starving and horrible. We pass one farm, and Chicken hisses, the ridge of fur along her back rising. Then we see what she sensed, the blood-sprayed field. The swarm eating the livestock, the livestock eating the swarm. Everett gags into his palm, turns away.

“I hate that I brought you here,” I whisper into our dark, cold car.

“There is nothing I wouldn’t experience to be by your side, Maisie,” he says into the quiet. He holds my hand in brief interludes, just long enough to give a flash of comfort, but otherwise staying at the ready. Each mile between West Point and the bunker takes off another year of my life, but finally we arrive at a dusty lane hidden in a copse of trees. No marker, barely wide enough for a car, but the first set of coordinates leads here. It’s midnight on the dot.

“Is this it?” Everett asks as I slow to a stop, then turn gingerly in to the small gap between the trees. “This doesn’t seem like a place anyone could live.”

“That is the whole point.” I wince as low branches scrape against the windows and what’s left of my solar panels. At least one was badly damaged during the escape from West Point, maybe more. Will they charge my car again? It feels indulgent to worry about that now, when I don’t know what we’ll find at these coordinates. If looters really did attack Gramps to steal his supplies, would they be here still? Would they take him prisoner or beat him unconscious or worse? We have Tasers. A machete in the floorboard. A single revolver Everett’s mother thrust into my hands, then refused to take back.

“Protect yourself, and protect my son,” she’d said. “There are worse things than zombies out there, Maisie. Like the people who let this all happen.”

It was a somber thought, reminding me how GI-27 originated in a lab. The accidental unmaking of our country, the death of millions, was all made possible by our government’s indifference to the costs of corporate greed. A new wonder chemical, so effective at preserving food and drugs, they rushed it to market with no real studies of its impacts, so pleased that it could be done that no one bothered asking whether it should be. No one except for Gemma, of course, who lost her job in the FDA for asking the questions our government didn’t really want answered. Not when corporations were throwing money left and right to get their hands on the new compound. The fact is, the capitalist machine has finally made America eat itself, turning us into a human Ouroboros straight out of one of Everett’s horror movies.