“Now, even when you find her, stranded at a truck stop outside of Vienna, you already know you’re falling apart. Even as you clutch her wrist and try to handcuff yourselves together, you know it won’t last. There’s tiny bits of you falling off already, Milan. I can see your little pieces drifting apart. It’s a jigsaw puzzle on a table in an earthquake, pieces flying up and apart, you trying so hard to cling together.”

Milan takes another step towards the door of the cubicle. He is frightened now. I can see veins pressing out from his forehead. He puts his arm out again, wrist trembling, tries to grab on to the wall, misses that, reaches for Zeke’s chair, but misses again.

“You stay the fuck away, you hear?” Hannah screamed.

She swung the tray again, heavy with nickels, and let go at the perihelion of the elliptic. The corner of the tray hit the animal in the eye, piercing the membrane, sending ichor and blood out in a spray like a boot stomping in a puddle. The cow moaned from deep within its poisoned frame. Hannah and I backed away as the animal began thrashing its head randomly, crazed and blind, hardly able to order its muscles to move its failing body.

In the quiet as Orlando and Edwin reloaded, I heard a noise outside the doors, a baying sound, like a dozen ululating elephants in a stampede. It was a sound that froze your blood into bits of shaved ice and then shook them around in a daiquiri of terror. The sound of an enraged, demented, possessed, infected cow was a sound to reduce grown men to shivering and bawling infants. The animal that made that sound had killed millions, billions, and here it was, butting at the door, angling for four more notches, four more little stick figures to draw on its hide.

“I hit it with four or five rounds,” Edwin said, “and I think I made it mad.”

“Now if we just started using honey,” Hannah mused.

“Terry wouldn’t like that.”

“Yeah, he wouldn’t. Yeah. But sometimes I just feel like,” Hannah shrugged instead of finishing the sentence. “I dunno. There’s no practical reason not to use honey, if we can find some bees. The infection’s limited to mammals, it can’t spread to insects, right?”

“It can’t yet,” I said, “as far as we know.”

“I know, it’s an ideological thing for them. Exploiting animals is what got humanity into this mess. But if all my food starts tasting like cardboard, I might just start biting people’s arms off myself.” It was a joke, but I didn’t really smile. She hit a little too close the visions that had kept me from sleep.

“So what was it?” I asked.

“Oh,” Orlando said, “oh, man. You are probably not going to like the answer to that question.”