Tony and Dax saw their opening and made their way over to me. I realized, much to my relief, that Evie was trotting along beside them, her grin stretching from ear to ear. I crouched down and she bounded over, her leash trailing behind her. She extended a paw when she reached me. I shook it, then looked up at Dax. “All this shit going on and you went to get the dog?”
“The city’s safe. I was worried about her.” Dax stooped to pick up her leash. “And our neighbor’s really nice when he isn’t waving a gun around.”
I straightened up and Evie bustled about us, greeting soldiers and citizenry alike and taking in all the exciting new scents.
Dax had put his Hastings Monarchs sweatshirt back on. I pointed at his shoulder. “Has that thing been fixed yet?”
“Oh!” A broad grin split his face. “Yes. Doctor Samuels intercepted me on my way back home. He tended to it.”
Thank God. If anyone could stem the infection from a zombie bite left to linger, it was Samuels.
“He asked for you. Said to come see him. And Tony is to report to him…oh, yesterday to see about that leg.”
“Fuck that,” Tony said. “He’ll have me on bedrest for a month.”
He seemed to have regained some of his usual swagger, but he still wasn’t putting a lot of weight on the injured leg. Samuels would have to tie him down.
“Speaking of Samuels,” I said, “Is it wrong that I can’t wait for him and Renati to chat?”
“They already were. It was…scientific.” Dax shook his head. “And kind of horrifying.”
I wondered if anyone had told Hammond about Alyssa yet. About the strange medication that had, as far as we could see, stopped the plague as we knew it in its tracks. The information needed to come out eventually—all of it. The strange serum the R&D team had developed, Renati’s continued research…
It all made my head hurt. Maybe that was best left for tomorrow.
Tony was watching me, his usual half-smirk nowhere to be seen. “You all right, girlie?”
I must have had a look on my face. I shrugged. “No worse than usual.”
“You were really something out there. Better not piss you off, huh?”
I choked down a laugh. “Oh, come on.”
“Really.”
“I would’ve been dead, if Logan hadn’t popped in. Has he come out yet?”
Both men looked at me for a long moment.
My stomach twisted uneasily. “What?” I asked.
“Logan?” Tony asked. “You saw Logan?”
“Yeah. He came in with his guns after I went running into the horde. Knocked a bunch of them off me so I could reload.” I reached behind me, felt the comforting presence of the STG still hanging off my back.
Dax crouched down and scratched Evie’s chest, rather pointedly not looking at me.
Tony, though, held my gaze. “I saw you out there wrecking shit. No one’s seen Logan. Renati has been looking for him all over.”
“It was at the end,” I said. “Right before I ran for cover.”
Neither of them said anything. The silence stretched on into something more uncomfortable,
“Things got pretty crazy,” Dax said, talking more to the dog than to me. “I know I didn’t see everything going on.”
Logan had turned up. He had stood guard while I reloaded—had pummeled the dead while I ran! The scene played itself over and over in my head. The cracked asphalt under my hands as I scrabbled for my lost axe. The groans of the dead as they closed in. And Logan, stepping in front of me, driving them back.
He had driven them back.
Hadn’t he?
What was the other option? That I had somehow turned into some sort of rampaging banshee and hallucinated a rescuer?
I couldn’t decide if I liked that or not.
Tony slung an arm around me. “I’m sure he showed up,” he said, lightening his tone. “Probably took a side street down and just got lost in the shuffle.”
Evie, still on her back, wagged her tail while smiling. It’s okay if you’re crazy, she seemed to say. I will love you anyway.
“What’s Hammond going to do with the stadium?” I asked. “With…are we going to bury Alyssa?”
“Got a lot of people to bury,” Tony said. “Burning, more likely. Maybe some kind of mass funeral just to get things cleaned up.”
The thought of Alyssa going up in flames made my stomach turn.
She’s not there anymore, Vibeke. She’s gone. Just a body.
We had to burn them. There was no other option. There wasn’t enough space left on earth to bury all its dead now.
“Guys! Guys!”
Gloria Fey came running up to us, her exhausted cameraman trailing behind her. Someone had patched up Vijay’s head, but he looked like he wanted to take a long nap rather than chase after his errant reporter.
“Gloria,” Tony said. “Nice to see you not incarcerated.”
“All charges dropped,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. “Apparently we’ve got bigger problems to deal with than me leaking classified information from a government that no longer exists.”
Was I supposed to offer congratulations or condolences to that? I couldn’t decide.
Gloria lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I heard someone found a freezer full of MREs that aren’t pastrami. You guys want dinner?
Dinner? I didn’t remember eating breakfast. How were we at dinner already? Mowing through swaths of the undead had made me lose all track of time.