He said, Things went from bad to worse. The other side scrambled pretty quickly. Like, what you’ve got to keep in mind is that we’ve got hundreds of cultists on both sides of the cow wall, and quite a lot of these guys are One Nation nutbars who think they’re going to see out the end of the world in a bunker and live to build a beautiful paradise that looks a hell of a lot like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. And those guys have illegal semiautomatics. We’ve still got Wi-Fi, more’s the fucking pity, and those guys are talking to their people on the outside, and they flip. So while me and the others are having this massive fight, we get the message that a hundred of these guys have changed their minds about us, and they’ve surrounded the inner building with guns and we’re going down. They’ve taken a hell of a lot of the other cultists hostage, so if I start killing anyone the hostages are dead meat.
He said, We kept on yelling at one another, but we mobilised while we yelled, making barricades. I didn’t just kill them all. It would have looked completely fucking shitty, and I was trying to win an argument that I didn’t solve all my problems with murder. Everything always happens at the worst time. We got everyone in the building on lockdown, using a bunch of procedures we developed in case some of the cryo stuff leaked. Shutters down, fire doors locked remotely, that kind of thing. And we built the barricades. You saw those.
He said, We tried talking to them, saying, Wow, this is not the time. Be chill. They didn’t listen.
A— said they’d sold out. I didn’t think so. They’d seen me fuck up once, killing the cops, and once people see you do something and come to an opinion about it, there’s nothing you can do. People don’t forgive, not really. Once they doubt, you’ve already lost them. That’s what was scaring me about the others. Had I already lost my best friends? The only people I needed? I’d just caught the fucking tooth bouquet at C— and N—’s wedding. What if that didn’t matter?
After a moment he said, Anyway.
The outside force of ex-cultists with guns were trying to force their way in, said they’d open fire if I didn’t walk out, and I said, Okay, do you want me to walk out, should I go, and A— and M— and the others said, Don’t you dare, John. Instead I sent out a couple skeletons to try to save the hostages. Lot of fighting, lot of confusion. We got some of the hostages inside the building, but then they charged us. We sealed up the hall when they busted through reception. You saw the front doors, right? They had Molotov cocktails. I was all, Next cult, let’s go for teenage girls instead, write that down somewhere. M— was all, Are you kidding, at least with these guys we have a chance of getting out alive.
I was still on call with G— the whole time. He was holding up well, dealing with a lot of negotiators telling him pretty awful shit. He was immovable. That was why I wanted him in: G— only listened to two people in his fucking life. He wasn’t going to listen to some white-collar asshole in a Kevlar jacket preaching about cost analysis. I was pretty sure he was safe: they were too scared to do anything to him. I was more freaked out about the guys hammering on the barricades. I couldn’t even take them down, because I was trying to do sixty fucking things at once. I was walking around a dead politician, I was having six conversations with people I was trying to negotiate with while making a barricade out of lawn chairs, and the hour was ticking down and I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do anymore. I’d lost my nerve. I didn’t know what I was going to do when the hour ran out. I had to admit that to myself. It was taking a lot of effort not to ice everyone within a kilometre, if only to get some fucking peace and quiet. But I figured that’d lose me the moral high ground.
He said, They were skirmishing down the hall when I did freak out and lock myself in the bedroom. I didn’t let anyone in except Ulysses and Titania, because they wouldn’t fight with me. Here. Let me take you.
He took her from the kitchen, the can of peaches forgotten. The skeletons moved to clear all the rubble from their path. At one point they reached a solid mass of bone, and as he approached it collapsed into dust so that he was walking through a bad-smelling mist. She followed him. The hallway behind it was clear, no piles of broken furniture or broken walls, but everything was filthy with water. The walls bowed. The lights had been ripped out of their housings, and parts of the ceiling had torn open and revealed big black gaps above the roofing panels. At last one of the skeletons opened a door so that they could stand on the threshold of a room, just a few steps away from what on first blush looked like a pile of wet brown clothes. So much of what was left looked like wet brown clothes. But there was a body inside those clothes that had not come through the water well. She looked at it, but he didn’t; he looked anywhere but at it. He covered his face, he uncovered his face. He looked away. It took him a long time to talk.