Walker hobbled down the road. He saw a phone on the street, discarded or thrown earlier when it was still useless.
He picked it up and touched the screen. It was locked, but he needn’t worry. He looked at the ground and the discarded cell phones like leaves in the fall, littering the ground, tossed away in some kind of mass movement against all that was happening. He picked through them until he found one that was not locked.
Walker rubbed the blood from his hand and dialed a number he knew by heart. And on the third ring it was answered and he heard the voice that he never wanted to forget, never could forget.
“Hello?”
“Eve . . .”
“Jed?”
“I . . . I’m . . .” Walker stumbled from the loss of blood and the phone clattered to the ground. The world started to spin as he tried to focus on the phones around him, to locate the one he had used. Sights and sounds began to blur and dim.
“Are you okay? Jed? Jed? Walker—Walker!”
Walker could hear Eve’s voice as he bent through doubled vision to retrieve the phone. Blood coated his hands and he fumbled until he wiped them on his jeans, and then he grasped the phone and brought it to his ear and sat down on the footpath. He lowered himself down, gently, onto his back. The ground was hard and cold, the sky was dark, most of the streetlights still yet to come on, a sea of stars above.
“I . . .” Walker said into the phone, his voice rasped breaths. “Eve, I’m sorry.”
“Where are you?”
“I just wanted you . . . to tell you . . .”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I wanted you to know that . . .” Walker blacked out for a second. He saw two National Guardsmen running toward him. “You—you need to know that I—how I . . .”
“Jed?”
“I wanted to tell you, Eve, I . . . that I . . .”
“I know. I know. Me too.”