Lexicon

his own reaction, because there was no mistaking that he wanted it.
    “Yeats?” said Plath.
    His mouth felt dry. A slight tingling in his palms. He had considered many outcomes for this day, but not the possibility that he would be moved.
    “We’re going to want to move. We’ve got emergency services inbound from two directions.”
    “A moment,” he said. He closed his eyes. He could perceive the danger now, the crevice that had swallowed those who came before him. And he could see what needed to be done. He opened his eyes and turned to Plath. To his surprise, she was in the process of snapping a heel from her shoe.
    He wasn’t himself; she saw something on his face. “It broke,” she explained. She tossed the heel into the night. Yeats heard it land. Plath began to wedge her feet back into her butchered Louboutins. “Ridiculous things.”
    When they were away from here, Yeats decided, and safely back at the hotel, he would visit Plath. He would enter her room and wake her gently and make her fuck her shoes. These Louboutins. It would serve a dual purpose, testing his ability to remain unaroused and teaching Plath proper respect for good footwear.
    “I can’t understand what motivated Woolf to do all this,” Plath said. Men in black jogged out of the darkness and began to heft Eliot.
    “We may never know,” Yeats said.
    • • •
    Harry ran down the main street, leaving the hospital, the emergency room, and many, many people who needed medical attention. He had tried to help. He had stayed long enough to bandage the jugular of Maude Clovis, who tried to scratch his eyes out as he worked. He had seen Ian Chu from Surgery cut three more jugulars with a scalpel, moving methodically from one person to the next, his eyes carefully judging each attack. He had seen Jim Fowles, a twenty-year cop, bring in a kid with a bleeding head and draw his revolver and execute that kid right there on the floor.
    That was when Harry decided to leave. What he was doing, stabilizing these people, that wasn’t helping them. That was only delaying. He stood and Fowles turned to him. The only reason Harry had not died then, under Fowles’s calm, unsmiling eyes, was that Chu chose that moment to step behind the cop and delicately draw the scalpel from left to right. Fowles gurgled and Chu plucked the revolver from him with his long surgeon’s fingers and turned it over, testing its weight.
    Then he had left. He ran, because all he could think was
Emily
. There was chaos outside but he ran through it. He found her vomiting over the rail of a traffic bridge. He caught her by the arm and hauled her around. Her face was ashen, her pupils dilated, like a junkie’s; for a moment, he barely recognized her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did it. I did it.” She wrapped her arms around her head and moaned.
    “We have to get out of here.” He was trying to think of vehicles. Something off-road. If he could get back to the house, they could take the bikes. “People are going crazy.”
    “It’s the
word
!” she screamed. She got to her feet and took two steps back toward the hospital, then veered around, clutching her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
    “Em,” he said. But he knew what she was talking about. That ridiculous piece of wood, with the black symbol, that she’d waved at him back at the house like it was a magical talisman. Like it could command him to obey her. He’d seen it in the ER with a piece of paper tacked to it that said KILL EVERYONE. At the time, it had not been the strangest thing in the room. “Your word? It
works
?”
    “I can’t stop it,” she said. “He won’t let me.”
    He left her and ran back toward the hospital. He was still a hundred yards away when he saw the two police cruisers parked outside. People clawed and reached, spilling over the cars, filling the air with cries. Harry had intended to go in there and get that piece of wood, hack it into a million pieces, but that was clearly going to be very dangerous. He hesitated at the intersection. A car purred behind him and his brain finally registered this as a danger and he threw himself out of its way. It blew by close enough to tug at his clothes and hit one person, then another, and crashed into one of the police cruisers. Its engine revved. Harry could see the driver tugging at the shifter, trying to get the car into gear. A cop came out of the ER and jogged up to the driver and shot him through the window.
    He noticed a