Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Mercury, Trapper, Linn and I sat in the cobwebbed office while a man crouched over my ankle working on the bracelet.

The air still carried the damp, still quality of a room that had been empty for a long time before tonight.

It started beeping.

The sound was small, insistent, and completely without mercy—a short electronic pulse that sat against the bone and announced itself to the room. He moved on to Trapper. The tools scraped softly against metal. Trapper’s breathing continued under the work. The four of us sat in a loose line of chairs that had never been meant for this.

Bagins stood in the middle of the small room with three of his men and none of them said anything, so the only sounds in there were the beeping and the scrape of the man’s tools.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Trapper’s joined mine, half a second out of time with it, and the two of them started fighting each other for rhythm.

The man moved to Mercury. Hers came alive—another pulse, another layer in the growing, arrhythmic chorus. Then he crossed to Linn.

"Don’t put your hands on me, you dirty zombie."

He made a sound that came from somewhere behind his own spine and stood up bent double with both hands pressed between his legs. The tools clattered to the concrete.

"J." Bagins came over. The movement was unhurried. "What did she do to you?"

"She kicked my nuts." It came out through his teeth. The words were tight and high and completely without dignity.

Mercury lost it completely, head back, both feet off the floor. The laugh tore out of her raw and absolute and filled the small room louder than the bracelets.

"Set her bracelet," Bagins said to another man, and walked over to stand above Linn with a second one at his shoulder. "I dare you. Do one more thing like that and you don’t leave this room at all."

The man crouched and worked and Linn’s bracelet started up with the rest. The fourth pulse joined the chorus. Four of them now, beeping over each other, filling the room with a continuous, overlapping insistence that had no centre and no edge.

"You have one hour," Bagins said. The words cut through the beeping without raising in volume. "Not one hour and five minutes. One hour. I want five new people. Each of you comes back with one."

"There’s four of us," Mercury said. The last of the laugh was still in her voice.

"You’ll bring an extra for Abram’s girlfriend." He didn’t look at me when he said it. The eyes stayed on the middle distance between the four of us. "I’ll give you a car. Everything after that is your problem."

"When do we go?" Linn’s voice had panic all the way through it now—thin, rising, the particular pitch of a person who had just felt the weight of the metal against the bone and understood what it was counting toward.

"Whenever you like. The clock is already running." Bagins turned for the door and opened it. "The car’s in the lot. Nobody will stop you."

Linn was up and gone before he’d finished the sentence. Her boots struck the concrete in short, hard bursts. Trapper went after her, the beeping of his bracelet receding with him down the thin-walled corridor. The overlapping pulses thinned and then thickened again as the distance changed.

Bagins’ men followed them out to tell the yard they were cleared to leave. Their shadows stretched long and overlapping across the floor and then were gone.

"Come on, Bram." Mercury tapped my shoulder as she stood. The contact was light, impatient.

"Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the car."

"Are you serious?" She stopped. The light caught the edge of her expression—disbelief, irritation, the particular energy of someone who had already decided the next thirty seconds were going to be a fight. "Those two are fucking lunatics. They’ll take off and leave us both standing here with these things on our legs."

"They won’t."

"Bram—"

"They won’t. Go."

She swore at me and went.

Which left the two of us.

"They will absolutely leave you behind," Bagins said. The words were quiet, almost thoughtful.

"You didn’t give them the keys."

He took them out of his pocket and put them in my hand. The keyring sat light and ordinary against my palm.

"Do you think a man with an hour to live needs keys to start a car?"

"No." I started walking and he fell in beside me. "But it’ll cost them four or five minutes working that out. That’s enough."

"Sure."

We came out into the big room. Hundreds of them still in there, the noise back up, groups forming and re-forming under the hard white lights. The scarred concrete held the same dust.

The air still carried sweat and old machine oil and the continuous low roar of a place that had stopped caring who heard it. The beeping of my bracelet was swallowed almost immediately by the larger sound.

"Keep her safe," I said.

"She’s perfectly safe." He lifted his chin toward the far wall. The gesture was small and absolute. "There."

Venna was sitting alone in the corner with her arms around her knees. She didn’t see me. She was looking at the floor in front of her boots and her hands were moving slightly, the way they do when someone is running through something over and over—small, continuous adjustments of the fingers, the private arithmetic of a person who has just been left behind on purpose.

Don’t look up. If you look up I’ll do something stupid.

The blue of her hair caught the edge of the light and held it. The absence of a bracelet on her ankle was the loudest thing in the corner.

"I’m sorry," Bagins said. The words sat soft and absolute between us. "It’s the only method I have of making certain you come back."

"I know."

"Don’t worry about her. She’ll be under my watch personally. Nobody else touches her."

"Okay." I turned away from the corner. "Let me go before they work out the keys."

I ran.

Because Trapper had put a net around this man’s throat two hours ago and Linn had kicked a man’s groin four minutes ago, and neither of them was going to spend one extra second waiting on a stranger. Mercury would be fighting them, shouting them down, buying me whatever she could.

The beeping of my bracelet climbed with the speed of the steps. The hard white light of the factory floor flashed past in broken rectangles. The hallway opened ahead of me—low red light, the same damp air, the continuous low roar of the place falling away behind.

Through the hallway, out through the entrance and into the lot.

The headlights were already on and Mercury was behind the wheel. The beams cut hard white across the packed dirt and the twisted shapes of other vehicles.

The night air was cooler out here, carrying dust and the distant organised noise of the camp.

"We were about to leave you," Mercury shouted, and there was real relief under it.

"You couldn’t."

She reversed hard to close the distance. The tires bit into the dirt. I pulled the door open and dropped into the front passenger seat. The interior still held the heat of four bodies and the continuous overlapping beeping of four ankle bracelets counting down the same hour from slightly different starting points.

Linn and Trapper were in the back, both complaining, neither stopping to hear the other. The words overlapped and cancelled. The beeping continued under all of it, small and insistent and completely without mercy.

Four bracelets beeping in one car.

"Right." I pulled the door shut. The latch closed with a soft, final click. The night outside the windows was dark and open and full of things that wanted exactly what we were about to go looking for. "Let’s go."

Mercury pulled out.

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