Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

I held its eyes across two hundred metres of empty road.

It held mine.

The street light between us threw the distance into hard segments—asphalt, shutters, the packed dark mass of the others still facing the building.

"Mercury." I put my hand on her back. The fabric was damp. She was still throwing—short, hard punches that had stopped being about winning and become about finishing.

"Let me teach this *** a lesson." She didn’t even look up. Her shoulder drove another one into Linn’s face. Linn’s legs kicked against the asphalt, finding no purchase.

I was already running the numbers.

Forward or back. Forward was open street with nothing to break line of sight for a hundred metres—a clean sprint into a killing ground if the mass decided to move. Back was the alley, and the alley was the answer, because if one of them came the rest would follow, and hundreds of bodies would hit that gap at once and choke it solid on their own weight. They don’t queue. They don’t take turns. They pour.

They’d wedge themselves in there and we’d walk out the other end.

If we get to it first.

"Mercury."

The punches had stopped but she was still on top of Linn, pinning her by the shoulders while Linn’s legs worked underneath her. Blood at both their mouths. The street light laid the whole of it in sharp, moving shadow.

"Look." Trapper’s voice came out almost at full volume. He’d turned. The swollen map of his face had gone pale under the light. "That thing is watching us."

"What?" Mercury was off Linn in a second. The motion was pure reflex—weight shifting, boots finding the ground, head snapping up toward the road.

She reached down and gave Linn a hand. Linn took it. The two of them came up together as if the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened, the fight dropped the moment the larger threat announced itself.

"Oh my God." Linn came up almost crying. The words shook. "Oh my God, we’re so dead."

The four of us stood in the light and faced it.

The infected hadn’t moved. Still holding the stare. Behind it the rest of the mass remained oriented toward the building, a dark geometric silence under the working lights. The distance between us and them felt both measured and already too short.

"What are we waiting for?" Linn’s voice was climbing again. Panic finding its volume. "Are you seriously standing here waiting for it to start running?"

"She’s right, Bram," Mercury said. Her hand was still on Linn’s arm. Neither of them had let go.

"We don’t move until we see what it does." I kept my eyes on it. The empty eyes. The slight open mouth. The absolute fixity of the attention. "That’s not a long distance and there are hundreds of them. If we run and they come, they’ll be on us before we clear the—"

I didn’t get to finish.

Boots on asphalt. The hard rhythm of people who had stopped negotiating with fear and simply obeyed it. I looked back. Linn out in front, running the way a person runs when they’ve decided their life is the only thing in the world—arms pumping, head down, no rhythm left, only speed. Mercury and Trapper matching her, the three of them already shrinking toward the corner of the building.

I turned back to the road.

The infected had turned around.

Not started walking. Turned. Faced back toward the building it had been facing before, and gone still with the rest of them. The motion had been clean, almost deliberate—head rotating, shoulders following, the whole body reorienting as if the four of us under the street light had simply been deleted from its available information. It settled into the mass. Became one more back among hundreds.

That’s impossible.

They don’t do that. They see a living thing and they come. That’s the entire arrangement. That has been the arrangement my whole life.

I ran after the others with my head full of it. The street light fell behind me. The dark between the pools of yellow opened and closed around each stride. My breath came hard and useful.

Something out here saw four people under a street light and chose not to. It looked at fresh blood and stayed where it was put.

Whatever the capital is dealing with, it’s not what I grew up outrunning.

I caught Mercury at the back. She was already labouring—the fight, the adrenaline drop, the sudden sprint on top of both. Her breath tore in and out.

"Are... they... coming?"

"No."

I got her hand and pulled, taking some of her weight, keeping her at Linn’s pace. Her palm was slick.

"Then why are we running?"

"Because they are." I looked ahead. Linn and Trapper were already at the corner, bodies leaning into the turn. "And I’m not being the one left standing in the road."

Linn and Trapper were moving at a speed I had genuinely never seen out of anybody. Whatever fear does to a body, it was doing all of it to both of them at once—legs driving, arms wild, the particular economy of people who had stopped caring how they looked and started caring only whether they arrived.

They hit the corner of the building together and were gone. The sound of their boots cut off as if a door had closed on it.

"Where have they gone?"

I didn’t answer. I pulled Mercury harder and we made the corner.

The side wall of the building ran long and blank under a single working light. And at the far end of it I saw the last inch of a metal door swing shut, and my ears gave me the latch a half second later—solid, final, the particular sound of a lock that had just finished its job.

"Those two idiots." Mercury folded over with her hands on her knees, dragging air. The words came out between pulls. "They’ve left us out here."

"I know which door it was."

"Bram." She looked up at me. Sweat at her temples. Blood still at the corner of her mouth from Linn’s fist. "What if they planned this?"

I looked sideways at her. The thought had already arrived in my own head and sat there waiting to be named.

"They didn’t."

"Why not?"

"Why would they?"

I asked it out loud and I already had the answer.

Two people with bracelets on their legs. Nine minutes left. Five bodies required. Four people standing in the open.

The arithmetic was ugly and simple.

Mercury didn’t say anything. The silence she gave the idea was worse than agreement.

"How long?"

She turned her wrist. The screen lit her face for a second in cold blue.

"Nine and a half."

"Right." I looked at the metal door. Blank. No window. No handle on this side that I could see from here. The light above it hummed once and steadied. "Let’s go and knock."

Mercury straightened up. The blood at her mouth had already begun to dry. She wiped it once with the back of her hand and left a dark smear across her knuckles.

We started toward the door.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!