15. The Sleepy Stick Has Branding Problems
THE SLEEPY STICK HAS brANDING PROBLEMS
GRANT
Grace defies categorization. I keep trying. It's what I do: I watch, I note the patterns, I create a framework of known behaviors and predict what comes next.
Grace doesn't have a behavioral vocabulary.
Grace has a behavioral jazz improvisation.
She talks in a continuous stream of language that replaces approximately thirty percent of standard English with a dialect that makes perfect sense if you stop expecting words to mean what they've always meant and start expecting them to mean what they look like.
I've known her for less than twenty-four hours and I don't know what to do with her. I do know that my attention drops to her mouth every time she looks at me. That behavior is much easier to categorize. Attraction. Immediate, inconvenient, and getting worse.
So I'm watching.
I slept on the crime boat last night. The captain's quarters, which Grace calls the thinking box, has a desk, a bench, and a floor, and the four of us divided the space the way animals divide a shared enclosure: by instinct, each body finding its position relative to the others.
At two in the morning, when Pepper needed formula, Beck was on watch beside the porthole. Joel was asleep against the wall, one hand still resting near his wrench. Grace had somehow migrated across the bench until one foot was pressed against Beck’s shoulder. He hadn’t moved it.
I fed Pepper in the quiet while Beck watched the lagoon.
Once everyone is awake, Grace unfolds the crayon plan on the desk and adds a new section: GARDEN PART CLEARING - TODAY. She draws an arrow pointing to the green section of her map, and underneath it she writes a list in seafoam green crayon:
Clear all buildings.
Seal perimeter.
Don't let Kevin kill me.
Round friend safety (PRIORITY).
I offer a different approach.
"They move in patterns," I say. The other three look at me.
"The infected behave like sick herd animals.
Disoriented, stimulus-responsive, gravitating toward movement and sound.
I've been watching them from the rescue center windows and they cluster.
They move toward noise. They follow each other. If one turns, the others turn."
"Like fish," Joel says.
"Like ungulates. Wildebeest, caribou. Herd animals that move as a group because each individual is responding to the one next to it. It's a cascade. They look organized but they're not. Each movement triggers the next."
Grace stares at me with an expression I'm still trying to classify. "You've been herding them."
"I've been redirecting them. The aviary birds are loud.
Especially the macaws. When the infected cluster near the rescue center, I open the aviary vents and the bird calls draw them east, toward the far perimeter.
It gives me a window to move through the zone.
Usually twenty to thirty minutes before they drift back. "
"You've been using birds as zombie bait," Beck says.
"I've been using auditory stimuli to exploit predictable behavioral responses in…"
"Zombie bird bait. That's genius. You've been doing zombie bird bait this whole time and we've been using ride cars and axes like amateurs."
I don't correct him. The description is reductive but not inaccurate.
"Can we use the same principle today?" Joel asks. "Draw them away from the buildings, and clear the buildings while they're clustered elsewhere?"
"I have something better than the aviary vents.
" I look at Captain, who's perched on the stand I wedged beside the porthole, tearing apart a strip of chicken I packed from the rescue center’s frozen supply.
"Captain can fly. He's non-releasable because of the eye, not because he can't fly. He's trained to return to the glove."
"You want to use Captain as an air unit," Grace says.
"I want to use Captain as a mobile auditory stimulus. If I send him to a perch point near the east perimeter, his vocalizations will draw the infected away from the central buildings and keep them clustered while we work."
Grace looks at Captain. "Captain is about to be deployed as an air-based zombie herding system. He's a tactical angry pirate bird. That's his rank now. He's been promoted."
Captain screams. I choose to interpret it as acknowledgment rather than protest, although with Captain, the distinction is largely academic.
I feed Pepper before we leave and settle her into the insulated travel pouch in the thinking box. Joel connects the heating pad to one of the ride batteries. She’ll be warm, secure, and asleep until her next bottle. We’ll be back before then.
We arrive in Wonder Garden on a Sunday morning that feels like a Monday that feels like the forty-seventh day of a week that started Thursday.
I release Captain from the glove. The recall whistle hangs around my neck. He launches, a burst of brown and auburn feathers, and climbs in a tight spiral above Wonder Garden. He reaches the east perimeter, finds the tall lamppost near the park wall, and lands.
And screams.
The scream cuts through the air. It's the kind of sound that evolution designed to carry across valleys and open terrain. It bounces off the park walls and echoes through the botanical gardens and every infected in Wonder Garden responds.
From our position near the butterfly pavilion, I see four of them in the garden paths, two near the restaurant, one by the gift shop entrance.
Their heads turn. All of them. Simultaneously. They move toward Captain. Toward the east perimeter.
"It's working," Grace whispers. She's crouched beside me behind a garden wall, friendship paddle across her knees, the foam trident strapped to her tote bag.
"We have maybe twenty minutes," I say.
"Twenty minutes. Three buildings." Grace counts on her fingers. "Six minutes each, with two minutes left for regret."
"That's not a lot of time," Joel says.
"Then we're fast. Beck, you take the restaurant. Joel, you take the gift shop. Grant and I take the butterfly pavilion. We seal, we move, we meet at the petting zoo," she says.
"Why are you with Grant?" Joel asks, and there's something in his voice, not jealousy exactly but adjacent, a territorial marker placed quietly.
"Because Grant has the sleepy stick and I have the friendship paddle and that's two weapons which is more than one weapon which is math, Joel."
Joel's jaw tightens. Beck watches the micro-response. I watch Beck watch.
"Go," Grace says.
Joel hands each team a maintenance radio. “Channel three. Check in when your building is secured. If you lose contact or the infected start drifting, retreat to the petting zoo. Nobody improvises a rescue alone.”
Beck looks personally targeted by the last sentence.
Joel and Beck split toward their targets, moving fast, Joel with mechanical precision and Beck with kinetic enthusiasm. Grace and I head for the butterfly pavilion.
The butterfly pavilion is a large mesh dome that used to house hundreds of tropical butterflies in a climate-controlled environment designed to simulate a rainforest. The mesh is intact.
The climate control isn't. The butterflies didn't survive the loss of their carefully maintained ecosystem, and the inside of the dome is a conservatory of dead plants and empty flight paths and the silence of a place where hundreds of small wings used to fill the air with movement and now don't.
It's supposed to be empty. For three seconds, it is. Then something moves behind the dead passionflower vines.
I stop.
Grace stops because I stop. She goes silent.
The movement comes again. A drag. A wet shift. The kind of sound that doesn't belong in a room designed for small wings and school field trips.
Grace raises the friendship paddle.
"No sudden noise," I whisper.
Her eyes move to me. "That sentence makes me want to make sudden noise."
"Please don't."
"I'm internalizing."
The vines part. The infected steps out of the dead greenery with a strip of mesh tangled around one arm and a laminated STAFF badge still clipped to its shirt. Horticulture, maybe. Someone who belonged here before here became this.
Its mouth opens.
My whole body calculates the consequence before the sound happens.
One call. One response. One head turning outside. Then another. Then the cluster Captain pulled east begins drifting back before we finish clearing the pavilion.
The infected inhales.
I raise the tranquilizer gun and fire.
The dart hits its shoulder. It jerks.
Grace whispers, "How much time?"
"Too much."
The infected makes a low, wet sound.
"No," she tells it.
The infected comes toward us.
I step sideways, putting myself between Grace and the infected, and reach for the catch pole clipped to the wall beside the supply cabinet. Every animal facility has them. Useful for injured raccoons, aggressive geese, and apparently the dead.
The infected lunges.
I catch its upper body with the loop, not cleanly. The cable catches across its chest and one shoulder. I pull tight.
It keeps coming.
My feet slide on fallen leaves.
"Grant," Grace says.
"Door," I say.
"What?"
"Use the door."
Grace bolts sideways, nearly trips over an overturned mister hose, recovers by grabbing a fake educational sign about metamorphosis, and yanks the staff door open with one hand. "Grant, I'm holding a door."
"Good."
"I don't know the next part."
"Get behind it."
She gets behind it.
I loosen the catch pole just enough to let the infected surge toward her. Grace makes a noise that isn't a scream so much as a formal objection filed at volume.
The infected reaches the doorway.
"Now," I say.
Grace slams the door. The edge catches the infected between shoulder and frame. Enough to pin it.
The infected snaps its teeth at the gap.
Grace shrieks through her teeth and shoves the door harder with her whole body. "I hate this butterfly jail."
"Hold it."
"I'm holding it with my entire ancestry."
The dart is starting to work. The infected's movements become uneven. Its jaw still works, but the body begins losing coordination, one system after another going offline in the wrong order.
Sedation in infected physiology isn't something I ever wanted to study.
Its arm comes through the gap, fingers clawing at Grace's sleeve.
She jerks back, then lifts the friendship paddle and brings it down on the wrist.
The sound is sharp. The hand drops.
Grace freezes for half a second, staring at what she did.
"Again," I say.
She looks at me.
"Grace. Again."
She hits it again.
This time the arm goes slack.
I step in, tighten the catch pole, and pull the infected backward at the exact moment Grace throws her weight against the door. The body folds wrong. The shoulder gives. The sedation finally takes enough hold that the legs buckle.
It drops to its knees.
Grace doesn't wait. She jams the flat blade of the paddle under its chin and shoves upward, pinning its head back against the doorframe.
"I'm extremely sorry about this," she says, breathless and shaking. "But you were about to ruin the plan and also my sleeve."
The infected's teeth click inches from the paddle.
I draw my knife.
One clean movement. Base of the skull. Quick, because quick is mercy when mercy has become small and ugly and practical.
The infected stops.
Grace keeps holding the paddle in place.
"Grace," I say softly. "It's done."
She doesn't move.
I step back. "You can let go."
She lets go.
The body slides down the door and lands among dead vines and laminated signs about butterfly life cycles.
For several seconds, neither of us speaks.
Above us, the empty mesh dome glows with pale morning light. The plants drip with condensation. Dead butterflies lie like scraps of colored paper along the path.
Grace looks at the paddle. Then at me. Then at the body. "Did we just teamwork? Without Joel? Without Beck narrating it like sports?"
"Yes."
She swallows. Her hands are shaking. She notices and immediately grips the paddle tighter, as if she can discipline her own fingers into behaving. "That feels illegal," she says.
"It was effective."
"It was horrible."
"Yes."
"I don't like that both those things can be true."
"They usually are."
She looks at me for a long moment, and I see the moment she files that away as another inconvenient fact in a growing pile. Then she points at the body with the paddle. "For the record, the sleepy stick was slower than advertised."
"It was never advertised."
"It's called a sleepy stick, Grant. The name implies a certain timeline."
"It's a tranquilizer gun."
"It's a sleepy stick with branding problems."
Despite everything, I laugh once, quietly. It surprises me. It surprises her too.
We sweep the remaining path, the maintenance alcove, and every dead wall of greenery. Nothing else moves.
Outside, Captain screams from the east perimeter, still holding the herd.
Grace looks toward the sound. "Okay," she says. "We seal the butterfly jail and never tell Beck there was a door kill."
"We probably have to tell him."
"No. He'll name it something awful."
"Yes."
"What would he call it?"
I look at the infected. "Door nap?" I suggest.
Grace stares at me. "That was terrible, animal doctor. Your joke privileges are under review."
"I accept that."
She steps around the body, careful, quiet now.
We close the staff door. I lock it. Grace stands beside me with the friendship paddle resting against her shoulder and dead leaves stuck to one knee.
"The butterflies had a bad week," she says.
I look up at the silent dome. At the empty air where hundreds of wings used to be.
"Yes," I say. "They did. Are you okay?"
"No," she says. "But I will be."
We seal the second access door and mark the pavilion clear.
Captain screams from the east perimeter, still angry, still on his perch, still holding the world in place one furious sound at a time.