Rewriting the Apocalypse novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Count Down

Jo set the microphone back on its stand, still switched on.

Every word she said from now on would reach three hundred donors and forty thousand phones.

"Okay, Doctor," she said. "I'm putting it down."

"Good girl." Faulk's thumb did not move. "Now come here, where I can see your hands."

Jo walked across the stage.

Her heels clicked on the boards, and the string quartet had stopped playing, and nobody in the whole room was breathing loudly enough to hear.

At the back, Eli had started down the center aisle.

Two guards caught his arms.

He did not fight them.

He only watched Jo with his bare hands open at his sides.

She stopped an arm's length from Faulk.

On the screen over her head, Bess was awake and staring, with the wire taped over her heart.

"Ten," Faulk said, with a little smile. "Nine."

"Don't."

"Eight."

Jo took a step forward and wrapped both her hands around Faulk's right hand, the one holding the remote.

Faulk's smile widened.

"Seven," she began, "six..."

The power went through Jo's fingers in one clean line.

Faulk stopped on the word, rigid, her mouth half open, her eyes wide and aware.

Her thumb stayed where it was, a hair above the red button, and it could not come down.

Jo leaned to the microphone with Faulk's frozen hand in hers.

"Ten," she said, loud and level. "Nine. Eight."

The room understood.

A woman at the front table put her hand over her mouth.

"Seven. Six."

Jo's voice did not shake.

She had been counted down in this voice, in that room, with her arms strapped to a chair, and nobody had been listening.

Everybody was listening now.

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