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The hospital was now a POW cah fence you’d see on aOutside of the fence were concrete barriers they’d dropped in to keep soh the fence with a truck Yet, John found no huuards on the outside Were they all in bed? Instead, stationed every two hundred feet or so was a driverless vehicle On the back of each was a turret, two thin barrels on each side of a cylinder outfitted with a bank of lenses Mechanical eyes, with radar or infrared or theruarded by robotic sentry guns Badass

John had coet a look into the yard--if Dave was alive and outside, and if John could get a glih But they had covered the damned fence in tarps that, inexplicably, were all printed withthe section of fence in front of hie billboard that said TRY THE BLACK ANUS QUARTER POUNDER) He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy John walked all the way around the fencing, a trip that took hi on how you looked at it That raised the question in John’s mind as to whether or not time would ever resume to normal speed What would he do if it just stayed this way forever? Take up a hobby?

John didn’t find an obvious way into the quarantine--he had been hoping that soate at the exactthe fence would be no easier in freeze-frame than it would be at normal speed In fact, the coils of razor ould be worse in this state of absolute rigidity John had a vivid i through his abdo like that, writhing in the razors, unable to free himself Unable to die For all of eternity

John coain

John noticed a frozen pillar of s horizontally over the fence in the wind, and figuredaround a caet up high enough to see over the fence …

Booht behind him They looked fairly climbable It occurred to John halfway up that this would have been impossible two months earlier--the frozen-in-time leaves would have sliced him open just as effectively as the razor wire But this was rab onto He was ed his head into an invisible force field Hanging above hiray haze and he finally realized it was the pluust of wind that John obviously could not feel He re-routed hiht where he could easily break his neck if he fell--

and lay writhing and screa, unheard in the eternity between moments

--he suddenly realized that the pluht over the fence and into the quarantine

Fighting every possible sense of balance and self-preservation, John steadied hi to keep his eyes forward and not on the i across The footing wasn’t bad, though; the tiny, suspended particles of ash had a rough texture, like walking on a huge bar of Lava soap

The pluot closer to the fire, and as soon as he passed over the fences he had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl He juround because it see bonfire, even if it was frozen in ti on trying not to fall on his head, he finally had ti on in the yard There were dozens of people in red and green jumpsuits Well, shit, he didn’t see why the situation in here was any worse than out in town Nobody had aover theuarded by robots If Dave was here and alive, then it seeliht, Oh

John tore his gaze away fro to count the skulls in there and was up to sixty-then he stopped--and started h the still life of the wax du in the yard were Dave, so he headed for the hospital itself Fortunately the door was propped open so he wasn’t going to have to figure out some convoluted way in--

Dave!

There, next to the main entrance of the hospital John almost missed hi his shoe He had an open can of beans sitting on the ground next to hi out And there was Molly, standing next to hi the beans with Dave’s attention diverted

A dah him so hard he almost collapsed