We left the car. We went on foot.
The alley was narrow enough that my shoulders found brick on both sides in places, and dark enough that I was walking on sound rather than sight. The walls held the day’s heat and gave it back in a slow, close press. Every footstep came back off the brick a half-second late.
Every apartment above us had its lights off. Every single one, all the way down. As if the dark would convince the things on the street that nobody lived here, as if a building could hold its breath.
Linn walked at the front because it was her route. Trapper behind her. Mercury behind him.
I took the back.
That was deliberate. Whatever came at this group was coming from behind us, and I was the only one here who’d survived being followed.
Mercury’s hips caught on the narrow part and stuck for a second. She laughed at herself, twisted sideways, and squeezed through. The scrape of denim on brick was brief and ordinary and somehow louder than it should have been.
"You’re certain this is the way?" Trapper kept it low. The words barely carried past Mercury to me.
"Certain." Linn kept hers lower. "This runs straight through to the other side. Comes out a couple of blocks from King’s camp."
"Feels like a long corridor."
"It is. But the other way round is twenty minutes and I don’t think we’ve got twenty minutes to spend on being comfortable."
"Right."
"Imagine if the infected found us in here." Mercury said it with the joke sitting right on top of it.
"For fuck’s sake." Linn’s voice came up a notch and bounced once off the close walls. "Why would you even put that in the air? I hate fucking zombies. That’s my actual, genuine, number one fear."
Mercury started laughing, quietly, both hands over her mouth. The sound stayed small and didn’t travel.
"It’s worth thinking about, though," Trapper said. "Genuinely. If they came in at both ends—"
"Would you stop talking about zombies."
Chuckling from both of them ahead of me. The alley took most of it and gave back only the edges.
My comms vibrated in my pocket.
I got it out while Trapper started complaining about something else and Linn shut him down. The screen threw a cold blue rectangle across my palm and the nearest stretch of brick.
"You lot should be more like the one at the back." Her voice drifted down the alley. "He doesn’t complain about anything. And I’m not even the one who came up with this idea, so all of you be quiet."
The screen lit my face.
May.
I answered instantly.
"May."
"It’s Sherry."
Her voice came through with something held down in it, the sound of a person keeping their excitement on a leash and not quite managing it. The channel was clean. Close. As if she were standing in the alley with me instead of wherever she actually was.
"Sherry." I kept mine at a whisper. "Are you all right?"
"I’m good, love. How are you?"
"LOVE?" May in the background.
"I’m fine. I’m fine, Sherry."
"Did you say something to me?" Mercury said over her shoulder.
"I’m on comms."
The murmuring and the arguing continued ahead of me, soft and continuous against the brick.
"You’re moving," Sherry said. "I can hear it. Is this a bad time?"
"It’s okay."
It was not okay. It was the worst possible time, in a black alley with a bracelet on my leg and four minutes of a plan I didn’t fully trust. I wanted to hear her voice anyway, and I decided that was allowed.
"Why are you even outside, Bram?" The worry arrived clean and immediate. "They’re saying the streets are infested."
"I’m good. I’m good, Sherry."
Ahead of us, light. Street light, spilling into the far end of the alley in a hard white rectangle that made the dark on either side of it look thicker.
"Listen to me." I dropped my voice further. "Don’t get far from May. Whatever happens out there, stay close to her."
"Why?" A pause. The silence on the line carried the particular quality of someone listening harder. "Bram, you’re frightening me. Is everything all right?"
"Yeah. Just trust me. I’ll explain all of it later."
"Okay."
The three of them slowed ahead of me.
We’d reached the end. They stopped and started whispering to each other and I didn’t catch any of it. Their shapes cut the white light into broken pieces.
"There’s something I need to tell you," Sherry said.
I stopped walking because Mercury had stopped. The cold blue of the screen was the only light on my end of the alley.
"Go on."
"Get off the comms, Bram." Mercury turned round and whispered it hard. The words had edges.
"I think I’m pregnant."
Everything in that alley went away.
The brick. The dark. The bracelet. The plan. The three shapes ahead of me cut out of the light. All of it dropped out of the frame and left only the voice in my ear and the sudden, absolute expansion in my chest.
"Are you sure?" It came out of me too fast. "Sherry, I’m so happy. I’m so—"
"Get off the fucking comms, Bram."
Mercury’s whisper had teeth in it now. She was close enough that I could see the shape of the words on her mouth in the spill of light from the street.
"I think I’ve called at a bad time." Sherry’s voice changed, and she was already retreating—the particular retreat of someone who had heard the urgency on the other end and decided not to ask. "Just stay safe. I love you."
"I love you more."
She hung up.
I stood in the dark with the comms warm in my hand and my chest doing something I had no room for. The cold blue screen went black. The alley returned in pieces.
She knows. She waited until she could tell me herself.
And I’m in an alley with a bomb on my leg.
"What is it?" I said.
"Linn says she’s seeing zombies out on the streets."
Fuck.
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