Free Artifact by Shane Lindemoen Page B

thought again, and this time he seemed a bit surprised that he couldn’t recall. “At the high school not far from my house,” he said hesitantly. “I teach twelfth grade biology at the high school, somewhere...”
    “What city is this?”
    He looked out of the window at suburban homes arranging a meticulous distribution of lawns and blacktop driveways. He took in the newer, clean, upscale vehicles and the yellow fire hydrants. “I don’t know what city this is,” he said distantly.
    “Do you know why you don’t know these things?” I said, “Because I don’t know them. And nobody that I’ve talked to since waking at the hospital this morning seems to know things that I don’t – date, time, location, and certain names of things – Don’t you think that is a little convenient?”
    When Sid was able to blink again, after several attempts to understand what was happening by divining some sense from the nightmare we were driving through, he must have lost control of what panic he kept contained until that moment.
    “Who are you?” Sid asked quietly, letting the engine’s hum fill the empty spaces.
    I turned to look out the window again, at the world that was falling apart around us.
    “I don’t know.”
    3.
    “Where am I?” Sid asked, unable to keep the choking panic out of his voice. I knew exactly how he felt. He felt like he was standing on a very high bridge that was falling away beneath his feet. This was the moment it finally crumbled and broke – when he finally realized the endless open maw below him, that his painful death was a matter of seconds away and there was nothing he could do about it.
    For a while I just sat and listened to him. I let what I knew was a hallucination take me – and for just a moment, I wasn’t entirely sure that Sid was a projection or not – it’s possible that we could have been sharing the same dream. It’s possible. But it was also possible that, in that land of dreams, he was just another part of me. And so I entertained the thought that I was watching my own panic again through Sid by proxy. Like I was reliving that moment in the hospital again, much like that moment in my bedroom, as I lay on the floor next to my bed bleeding to death, watching my other self in the mirror. Except this time it was Sid, and the dizzying sense of vertigo was gone. I turned back toward the window and the burning cars in the road, and the hordes of zombies began to melt together to form a type of river – a fluid movement of experience as it bled into something that I figured was this reality collapsing – and the sound of Sid’s sobbing enveloped me–
    4.
    “We’re going to have to run,” Sid said.
    I looked around the ruins. We were stopped amid a cluster of high–rises, as the mob of death poured at us from all directions. There was a group of people, maybe three or four – I could make out at least one young woman wearing a leather jacket, who had a fully shaven head – standing on top of a long semi–trailer a few blocks away, hopelessly watching the bodies pile up around them.
    “Where?”
    He pointed at a lone building a few blocks away, with a sign that said Center for Energetic Materials . There was a single car parked in the lot beside the building, and I wondered if that belonged to Alice, which made me think about the ripping sound of her scream as the elevator closed on me, which then made my stomach lurch.
    Every road and alley that Sid’s car could have traversed was obstructed by another empty, demolished vehicle, or a large pack of the walking dead. The sun was still hours below the horizon.
    Sid tried to hand me his baseball bat, but I couldn’t hold it. My burns were excruciating, and I couldn’t take my arms away from my side.
    “I can already see a key–pad on the left side of the door.” Sid strained to see through a pair of binoculars. “And a card–swipe.”
    I pulled the key–card out of my robe – unfazed by the contradictory nature