Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Venna crossed toward the door without losing a step. Mercury went after her, dodging one man and then another—bodies already flooding the centre of the road.

I was moving and I couldn’t stop. Stopping in that meant going down, and going down was the worst outcome available on that street. The asphalt under my boots was ordinary for three more strides. Then it wasn’t.

The men swallowed her. I lost her completely in the bodies and never saw whether she made it.

Then, a few seconds later, I caught the door swinging shut.

Good enough. That has to be good enough.

The infected were on us.

And the sky opened.

Balls of fire and something burning blue came down off the roof of that building, raining onto the men at the back of our line, dropping into the middle of them. The light was wrong—too clean, too deliberate. Men screamed.

Then we collided.

One of them hit me and I went backward into the men behind me like I’d been struck by a truck. The force was absolute. My feet left the ground. The sky and the street lights swapped places and then the asphalt found my spine.

No. Nothing that size moves with that much force behind it.

I was on the ground and the feet arrived immediately. Boots coming down all around my head, some clearing me, some not. The continuous thunder of hundreds of people and the infected meeting in the same strip of road, all of it happening above my face.

I turned my face into the road. Grit and something wet against my cheek. A boot landed square on my back and pushed off it—someone using me for purchase without knowing or caring what I was. Another one came down beside my ear and missed by nothing at all. The air displaced against the side of my head.

I got my hands under me and forced myself up, and somebody hit me and put me straight back down. The second impact was cleaner than the first. My vision went white at the edges and then grey.

[ Dangerous position. Get up. ]

I stopped trying to stand and rolled instead, sideways, toward the nearest wall, purely on luck and the hope that nothing came down on my spine while I did it. Elbows, hips, the continuous scrape of asphalt against fabric and skin. A boot glanced off my thigh. Something wet and heavy landed near my shoulder and moved. I kept rolling.

My side hit brick.

The wall meant nobody could reach me from one direction. I got a hand up it and started working myself upright and my head swam, my vision going in and out—street lights, fire, the broken geometry of bodies in motion, all of it sliding across itself without settling. The brick was cold and solid under my palm. I used it.

The hearing was making it worse. People dying in one street, straight into my skull—the layered thunder of hearts that had been running too fast now skipping, stopping, the wet sounds of things that were no longer hearts at all. Screams. The particular short cry of someone who had just understood what the teeth in his shoulder meant. I switched it off.

The street continued without the sound of its own dying. Only the physical facts remained—impact, heat, the continuous shove of bodies against the wall I was using.

I got up.

My sight came back and the street resolved and I understood immediately that this was already over. The fight had been going for maybe two minutes and it was already out of anyone’s hands.

Men who had been alive when Bagins shoutedfor the walls were on the ground and getting back up wrong. The ones still living were fighting the ones who had just stopped, and the ratio was moving in one direction only.

A bubble of fire came past my head close enough to take the hair off my arm. The heat was clean and brief. The blue edge of it lit the brick beside me for a fraction of a second and then was gone into the mass.

I moved along the wall, shoving through whoever was in front of me, because the difference between our men and theirs had stopped being something I could read at speed. Living faces. Turning faces. Faces that had already finished turning and were only interested in the nearest warm body.

The wall kept one side of me clear. The rest was continuous negotiation with shoulders and elbows and the occasional hand that tried to hold on.

"BAGINS."

One of them came at me and took my charge in the chest. The body dropped. I stepped over it and kept moving. The space it left filled immediately with someone else.

"BAGINS."

The men were fighting. That was the thing that stayed with me. They were fighting properly, all of them—fists, improvised weapons, the particular desperate competence of people who had spent two days in a warehouse being told they were an army and had finally been given the chance to prove it.

And it made no difference at all, because they were turning faster than they were falling and every man who went down came back up on the other side. The front of the wave was no longer a line. It was a conversion process happening in real time across the width of the street.

Up on the roof, Max and the bald girl stopped.

The fire stopped with them. All of it. The blue and the ordinary orange cut off mid-air as if someone had closed a valve. They just watched. Two figures on the edge of the building, upright, oriented, the particular stillness of people who had spent what they needed to spend and were content to let the rest of the work finish itself on the ground.

They’ve stopped because they don’t need to spend anything else on us.

My eyes went right.

The shop door was shut. Still shut. No light under it. No movement at the frame. The dark interior held whatever it held and the street continued without it.

Thank God.

I looked back at the street, at four hundred people Bagins had pulled out of locked houses with a speech and a broadcast and a promise, feeding themselves into an army.

The conversion was accelerating. Pockets of the living still fought in the centre and along the far wall.

"ABRAM."

Bagins’ voice.

I found him ahead of me, on his feet, swinging at three of them with nothing but his hands. The grey at his temples. The tired face gone past tiredness into something raw and absolute. He was still fighting the way he had spoken on the warehouse floor.

I charged everything I had.

Every body I met on the way went down, and I knew it wouldn’t hold. Most of them weren’t dying from one strike anymore. They were dropping and getting back up behind me. The charge lit the space around me in brief hard flashes. Shoulders, chests, the occasional face that still looked almost human when it took the impact and then stopped looking human as it hit the asphalt. I didn’t look back at the ones that stood up again.

A shoulder came at me and I turned mine and let it pass into the flow. The next one met the God Hand punch on the spot and folded. The gap it left was enough. I took it.

I reached him.

I put charge into everything within reach of him and drove him back against the wall before he could throw himself at them again, because he was gone. His face was gone. He was watching his own men stand up wrong.

"Don’t move."

I held him there and built the charge into a shell around the two of us. The light of it was hard and clean against the brick. The infected that reached it bounced off and reeled away, the particular wrong confusion of things that had been given an order and found a surface that refused to accept it.

"My men are dying." He shoved at my arm. The strength in it was real and completely useless against the shell. "Let me go. LET ME GO."

"Hey. HEY." I got in front of his eyes. "Look at me. They’re not dying. They’re all going to turn. Every one of them. Those aren’t your men anymore, they’re his."

"You told me—"

"I never told you I’d keep them alive." I kept hold of him. The shell held. Outside it the street continued its conversion without either of us. "I told you the only way to stop Sinn was to reach the headquarters. That’s still true. That’s still on the table. Nothing that’s happened in the last two minutes has changed it."

Bagins looked past me, out through the shell, at the infected bouncing off it and reeling away.

Almost everyone we’d brought was on the other side now. A handful were still fighting in pockets—three men near the abandoned trucks, two more against the far wall.

"Let them die for a reason, Professor," I said.

He stopped pushing.

The strength went out of his arms. His back went against the wall and stayed there. The shell hummed around the two of us. Outside it a man I had stood beside twenty minutes ago in the yard—someone who had climbed into a truck with a joke and a borrowed weapon—came up off the ground with his jaw hanging wrong and turned toward the nearest sound.

"Do you have a plan?" His voice had lost the warehouse. What remained was quieter and closer to the ground.

"The only way out of this street isn’t fighting." I watched the man with the wrong jaw take three steps and go down again under something I couldn’t see from inside the shell. "It’s negotiation."

Bagins laughed.

Then something broke in the middle of it and came out as a small, ugly cry. The sound of a man who had spent the evening being a leader and had just been given the bill for it in a single continuous street-wide conversion.

"Negotiate," he said. "With who, Abram? With them?"

My eyes went ten metres to the building.

And then all the way up it.

Max Donman. Standing on the edge of the roof with the bald girl at his side.

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