“Are you okay?”
He rolled onto his side and reached for the clothes. “Scraped my hand,” he said. “Nothing I haven’t done before.” He dragged the pants across the ground and twisted his legs into them. He wrestled the sand-colored tee shirt over his head, waved off the boots, and hand-walked himself over to the wheelchair. The soldiers stepped forward and lifted him in a fireman’s carry for the last few feet, setting him down in the leather seat. One of them handed him the coat. It had been stripped of rank, but the name ZZZAP was on a velcro strip above the heart. He smiled.
“Good, sir?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for the assist. Nice jacket.” He draped it across his lap.
“Will you need an escort, sir?”
It took him a moment to understand they were offering to push the wheelchair. “That’d be nice, thanks.”
They went up the ramp into the office building. It was spotless, and the scent of cleaning chemicals hung in the air. More than half the lights were out. Colonel Shelly pulled off his cap, revealing a wire-brush scalp. He followed Barry’s eyes up to the ceiling. “Power conservation,” he said. “We try to run as few lights as possible, even at night.”
“Gotcha.”
“I appreciate your trusting us like this, sir,” he said.
“We’ve all got to start somewhere,” said Barry. “And could you not use ‘sir’? It always makes me feel like my dad’s leaning over my shoulder.”
“Force of habit, but I’ll do my best. What do you prefer?”
“Barry. Mr. Burke if that’s too casual for you.”
“I can make do with Mr. Burke. Agent Smith tells us you’ve got almost twenty-four thousand people out in Los Angeles.”
“More or less.”
An older man was waiting for them in the officer’s mess. His uncombed beard was a mess of gray and silver, and it looked like he’d slept in his clothes for a while. He ran a finger back and forth across the tabletop, like a blind man reading a Braille headline again and again.
“This is Doctor Sorensen,” said Shelly. “He’s the scientific head of Project Krypton. Captain Freedom and the rest of the Unbreakables are the result of his work.”
Barry held out his hand. “You must be very proud. They’re pretty amazing, from what I’ve seen. Not a lot of people can take on St. George mano-a-mano, y’know?”
Sorensen looked up from the table. His watery eyes met Barry’s and he reached out to take the hand. He moved in slow motion, as if every action needed hours of rehearsal time he hadn’t been given. “Hello,” he mumbled.
“Pleased to meet you.”
The older man moved his mouth a few times, starting half a dozen words, and then went back to examining the tablecloth.
There was a small buffet set up for them. Bacon and eggs in one chafing dish, english muffins and french toast in another. Two large pots of coffee. The soldier guided the wheelchair along the table while Barry overfilled a plate. He shoved some food in his mouth while they moved.
“Oh my God,” Barry said. “You don’t know how much you miss bacon until after the zombie apocalypse.”
“We’re spoiled, I guess,” said Shelly. He and Sorensen followed behind the wheelchair with plates of their own. “The Army keeps these places well stocked, and even with the rationing we’ve set there’s still enough food here and in Yuma for another twenty-eight months or so.”
They took places at a table. Shelly paused to say a silent grace and nodded for them to begin. Barry ate with his usual gusto while the colonel took quick, precise bites.
Sorensen had a single scoop of scrambled eggs on his plate. He pushed them back and forth with the fork, still in slow motion. Every third or fourth push one of the tines would scrape like fingernails on a chalkboard. Barry glanced from the doctor to the colonel. The officer didn’t seem to register the older man’s behavior.
“How long did it take you to get out here, Mr. Burke?” Colonel Shelly asked after a few minutes of eating. “You caused a sonic boom, didn’t you?”
“About twenty minutes,” said Barry. He crunched down on another piece of bacon and let it sit on his tongue for a moment. “The sonic boom’s a bit of a trick, though.”
“How so?”
Sorensen interrupted by dropping his silverware. “Is your energy output related to caloric intake? Does your body begin to cannibalize its own muscle and bone mass after a certain point?”
“Yes and yes.”
The doctor began to tap the fingers of his left hand against his thumb. “Is it dangerous,” he said, “for you to come in contact with other objects?”
Barry folded a piece of french toast in quarters, ate it in two bites, and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee. “How do you mean?”