Artifact by Shane Lindemoen Page A

my head out of the window and saw a man with red hair, wearing faded black cotton shorts, flip–flops and a tattered white tee shirt standing at the entrance to the CEM. He frantically tugged at the door, but it didn’t move.
    He stuffed more bullets into his gun, closed the loader and opened fire into the crowd again.
    It was Sid.
    The vertigo of temporal discontinuity almost knocked me off of my feet.
    The fact that these separate visions were somehow interconnecting was probably a good sign. But that would mean there was another me out there. And judging by the sweat pouring from Sid’s face, and the desperate way in which he moved back toward his car implied that the other me must not have made it. Sid couldn’t have opened the door without my thumbprint or access code, and he knew it.
    With his ammo exhausted, Sid threw his gun at the closest zombie, and then started swinging into them with his aluminum baseball bat.
    The barricade in front of the building’s entrance.
    That’s where Alice must have gone.
    I knocked several boxes off of a shelf as I ran out of my office, sprinting down the hall. I gingerly hopped over the emaciated janitor, and hit the emergency stairway, taking it five at a time, heading to the ground floor.

SIX
    1.
    A dark silhouette finished pushing a table against the door.
    “Alice!”
    She spun around and pointed the silver gun at my chest, and when she realized it was me, slowly lowered it to her side. “Lance – help me,” she said. “They’re breaking through–”
    “We have to open it,” I said, breathing heavily. “There’s a friend outside.”
    “What?”
    “We have to open the doors, let him inside.”
    “Are you crazy? There are hundreds of them out there–”
    I moved past her and started pulling things off of the pile.
    “Lance, stop – your friend isn’t out there. Do you even know what’s happening?”
    “Yes – just help me.”
    She grabbed my arm. “Lance, don’t–”
    I pulled away and her fingernails took a bit of skin. Blood welled up from the scratches. “Don’t open that door,” she warned.
    “Trust me–”
    “No, Lance – stop!”
    “Goddammit Alice – he’s going to die!”
    She stepped away and raised the gun to my chest. “There’s nobody alive out there. I – I’m sorry but your friend is gone. Step away from the doors.”
    I carefully bent and set the box in my hands onto the floor.
    “Alice, listen to me,” I said calmly, slowly raising my hands. “There’s a guy out there named Sid. I was trying to help him – he actually helped me. He saved my life. He’s outthere right now. Didn’t you hear the shots?”
    She hesitated.
    “It’s okay – we’ll open the doors, let him in, and get the barricade back up as fast as possible.”
    She clenched her jaw and put her finger on the trigger. “How do we know he’s not sick like rest of them?”
    “Trust me, Alice.”
    She shifted her balance from one foot to the other, weighing the risks.
    “Alice, each second we waste is one less than he has,” I said. “Please.”
    She swore and tucked the gun into her waistband. We started peeling things off of the mountain of junk.
    I pulled the six-meter banister out of the handles and pushed the doors open.
    Sid was twenty meters away, hacking a path from the building to his car with his baseball bat. A ring of corpses lay on the ground at his feet, already starting to move again.
    “Sid!” I screamed, waving my arms in the air.
    Alice fired into the hordes that began pushing toward the entrance.
    Sid turned, and when he saw me standing in the doorway waving him in, his face momentarily fell. He immediately regained composure and ran.
    After juking his way through a tunnel of dead arms, he dove inside and messily rolled to his feet. He immediately started helping Alice and I rebuild the barricade, breathing as if he couldn’t get enough air. The masses outside converged onto the entrance, causing it to bow inward, but the