Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Bagins watched the last of his men move toward the doors and then looked over at me and smiled.

"Let’s go, Abram."

There was real joy in his face. Not the performance he used on the floor. The man was genuinely enjoying working with me, and I had no idea what to do with that.

The four of us walked out last.

Venna at my side. Bagins and Mercury ahead of us, moving like two people who had known each other for years, which they had not.

The room emptied behind us. We went down the red corridor and out into the yard, where the men were shouting at each other and hauling themselves up into trucks.

Four of them, engines already running, headlights throwing everything into hard white. The packed dirt of the yard jumped with the vibration. Men climbed the sides, swung into the beds, called numbers and names and insults with the particular volume of people who had decided the night was finally moving in a direction they could use. The air smelled of diesel and dust and the thin continuous smoke.

Bagins went ahead to give his last instructions and the three of us stood and watched him do it. He climbed the step of the lead truck and his arms started going—pointing, counting, cutting the air into sections the drivers could follow.

"Do you know what this reminds me of?" I tapped Mercury’s shoulder.

"The Fallen City."

"Yeah." I nodded at Bagins, up on the step of the lead truck with his arms going. "Major, specifically. There’s a lot of him in that man."

"I don’t see a lot of similarities, actually." She kept watching the trucks fill.

"You’re right." I let a beat land. "And who would know the two of them better than a woman who’s slept with both?"

"Nah." She laughed. The sound was short and real and cut clean through the yard noise. "I have no interest in Bagins."

"You two seem to share a lot of history," Venna said. Her voice stayed quiet enough that the nearest men didn’t catch it.

"Not much." Mercury turned to her. "But we’ve both been at a party where everybody had to be naked."

"Wow." Venna left it exactly there.

"I know what you actually want to ask." Mercury looked her dead in the eye. The headlights caught the challenge in the look and held it. "’Have you two ever fucked?’ Sadly not. But I remain optimistic."

Venna looked at me and started giggling. The sound was small and helpless and completely out of place in a yard full of armed men climbing into trucks, which made it better. Her hand found mine again without looking for it.

"You’ll love her more when we’re moving," I said.

Bagins was walking back toward us. Every man was up and in. The last tailgate slammed. The engines settled into a collective low idle that filled the yard and pressed against the walls of the facility behind us. The column sat ready under its own headlights—four trucks, four hundred men, the dark green jeep at the head of it waiting with its doors open.

"There’s our ride." He pointed at the jeep. "Does one of you drive, or do I pull a boy off a truck?"

"Don’t worry about it." Mercury was already walking to it. The decision had been made before he finished the question.

She swung into the driver’s seat and put both hands on the wheel as if the vehicle had been waiting for exactly those hands.

We got in. Bagins took the front passenger seat, Venna and I went into the back.

The jeep’s suspension complained once over the yard’s ruts and then found the road. The headlights ahead of us cut a hard white path into the dark. Behind us the first truck’s beams filled the cab in a continuous wash of light that moved across Bagins’ shoulders.

"All they want is hope." Bagins had pulled something up from the footwell, a radio unit with a C-shaped device sitting on top of it. The plastic of it looked ordinary and slightly worn. His fingers moved across the controls with the particular familiarity of someone who had already used it before. "That’s the whole of it. That’s all any of us ever needs. Wouldn’t you say?"

I watched him work at it in the dark with the headlights of the truck behind us washing through the cab. The road unrolled under the jeep’s tyres. Empty shopfronts slid past. The street lights burned in their isolated pools and the dark between them stayed dark.

"What is that?" Mercury asked. Her eyes stayed on the road. Both hands on the wheel. The speed was steady, measured, the pace of a lead vehicle that had four hundred men matching it from behind.

"This is how I get into the government broadcast system." He didn’t look up. The adjustments continued. "Every speaker inside these walls. I took it out of Miss Brown’s house after she left Hogsby." A glance back at me. The headlights from behind caught the edge of the look. "Abram knows her."

Miss Brown.

Of course. Of course that’s where it came from.

She had left Hogsby. He had gone into her house. The device in his hands was the physical fact of how a failed professor had put his voice into every locked room in a single night.

"So you’re going to broadcast," Mercury said.

"Yes."

"Is he the voice we heard at Abuela’s?" Venna asked me quietly. She hadn’t put it together until now. The recognition arrived in her face in stages—the speakers, the deep voice, the call to take the streets—and settled on the man in the front passenger seat with the C-shaped device in his hand.

"Yes."

Bagins lifted the C-shaped device to his mouth. The plastic of it sat dark against his face. The headlights from the truck behind us washed the cab in continuous white.

"This is Robert Bagins."

He waited half a second and I imagined it landing in every locked room in the capital—the kitchens, the bedrooms, the corridors where people had stacked furniture against doors and sat in the dark listening to government broadcasts and the continuous low sound of the streets changing. The speakers would carry his voice the way they had carried Sinn’s. The difference was the direction.

"We are currently moving toward the CGI headquarters. Any person who is tired of hiding. Anybody who still believes something inside these walls can change. When you hear the trucks on your street, come out of your house and join us."

A pause. The road continued under the jeep. Behind us the column held its spacing. Ahead of us the dark between the street lights held whatever it had been holding all night.

"If you will not save yourself, then nobody is going to save you."

He set it down. The device settled against the radio unit with a soft ordinary click. The broadcast was finished. The speakers across the capital would either open doors or leave them locked. Neither outcome was available for examination from the back seat of a jeep.

Nobody in the jeep said anything.

Because the only road to the headquarters ran through the infected.

Four hundred metres ahead, hundreds of them were still standing in the road.

And now we were bringing four hundred men straight toward them.

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