He fell quiet.
After a while she prompted, You made it from your bodies?
He said, Nah. I decided I didn’t want to touch any of the bodies, not only Titania and Ulysses. They’d all been through a lot.
It was at this point that he had the grace to look embarrassed.
He said, I’m not proud of this. But, well—like, we were on farmland. With farm animals. Big things with mass to spare. The field just over the road from us had over eighty head of cattle, field over that had a lot of sheep, and the bush was full of old bones. I had to—get creative. We had to lock C— in the kitchen when she found out so she could throw up in private for a while, and we wouldn’t let her look at it. Thankfully it was dark, so there wasn’t too much to look at.
He said, It wasn’t clean. I had to unsleeve them to get two piles to work from, softs and bones, and it was not beautiful. But it worked. A three-foot-thick shield of meat, bone, and sinew spread over two acres of Greytown land. You could see it on Google Earth. Kind of pretty, from far off. Sort of pink.
He said, And then the government was like, Okay, let’s talk.
He said, It had worked, and we were all okay. And the rest of the world knew too, you can’t erect a two-acre cow-and-sheep shield without it making the news, though I think they censored the close-up pictures. They took us seriously after that. Some of them wanted to talk to us, to see who we were, and some of them didn’t want to talk to us because we were evil, and some didn’t want to talk to us because we were forcing their hands. Sure, I’d cured a bunch of people of cancer, but I was freaky. They treated us like we’d done some kind of huge crime.
After a pause, he said: I mean, I had kind of done a huge crime. I’d turned several hundred animals inside out and made them into a big art installation and I hadn’t complied with the cops, but extenuating circumstances, okay? There were extenuating circumstances. It wasn’t my fault that turning several hundred animals inside out makes you look like the bad guy. They were beef cattle and mutton; my way was a hell of a lot quicker than the abattoir. But it’s hard to be all, Let’s listen to magical inside-out animal-shield man. He obviously has some good ideas.
He said, I didn’t care what they thought, I wanted the attention. I wanted to break my NDAs. I wanted to let them know about the cryo plans and how we got shut down. I wanted to talk about you. About how we’d been going to save the world and then the cash dried up for no reason. And now we had a platform, so maybe the cash could come back, somehow. But we’d scared a lot of people. We also had more enemies than we’d ever had before.
He said, I guess you could say … we had beef.
When she did not laugh he said, “I can’t believe nobody’s ever going to laugh at my jokes again. I can’t believe it. It’s all gone, I’m the only one left. It’s just me and you and no more jokes.”
She said, “I still love you.”
And he laughed and said, “That was a good one.” Then he wept again.
16
NONA AWOKE WITH A START right before the door crashed open, like she had an extra sense for crashing doors. Honesty ran into the room, not even taking off his outside boots or his sand jacket, and he shouted: “They’re coming—they’re here now. They’re setting up that ole video screen in the square tonight, they’re gonna screen some video, at half five o’clock. It’s them, it’s zombies, they’re back! Holy shit!”
“Language, Honesty,” said someone else. Nona rubbed her eyes and struggled to sit up; she had been about to say the same thing, but all that came out was “Wharrgarbl.” It was the voice of the Angel, who had taken up position quite near the big whiteboard, one knee folded over the other.
“I’ve got to swear, sir,” said Honesty. “You can’t let me not swear about this. It’ll give me inhibitions. Anyway”—struck by fresh inspiration—“with zombies here, sir, I’m not going to bother with school anymore. There’ll be a war. I’ve got to deal full-time.”
“Then you better attend maths lessons, at least,” said the Angel drily. “I’ve seen your multiplication, Honesty. You’re going to get stiffed.”
“Maybe maths, if I feel like it,” allowed Honesty, and he turned to the mats: “Hot Sauce—Hot Sauce, what’re we going to do?”
Hot Sauce was sitting up on her mat, knees drawn to her chest, arms loosely dangling over her knees. “Wait and see,” she said.