Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"Max has built an army out here," I said. "He’s working with a bald girl."

"That’s Ingrid." Becky didn’t hesitate. The name arrived complete, as if she had been waiting for someone to ask it. "She’s our half sister. And don’t underestimate her, Bram. Whatever you’re thinking about her, revise it upward."

"I can’t underestimate anything right now. We’re surrounded. We want to negotiate with him and I don’t have his number."

A pause on the line. Outside the shell the converted street continued its low wrong motion. Bagins watched my face. The blue edge of the charge put a thin line of light along his jaw.

"You know he hates you." Her voice dropped. "You do know that."

"We just want to try."

"Okay. I’ll send it." Another pause. "But listen to me. When you get up there, if he won’t agree, you leave. You don’t argue with him, you don’t push him, you just go. And Bram, Ingrid is a good person. She’s the best of us."

I noted it and said nothing.

"And if you see him losing himself." Her voice went very quiet. The words arrived with the weight of something practiced. "Tell him it’s raining in Goth. Exactly that. It is raining in Goth. Understood?"

"Yes." I said it slowly. "Thank you."

The line disconnected.

It had been on speaker and Bagins had heard all of it. He was already looking at my comms. The particular hunger of a man who had just been handed a number and could already see the roof and the conversation waiting on it.

A message came in from May’s number on top. The screen lit the inside of the shell in cold blue. Digits. A name.

"She’s sent it."

"Dial him," Bagins said. "I’ll do the talking."

I dialled.

He answered instantly. Like a man sitting with the device already in his hand.

And said nothing at all. The silence on the line was complete and deliberate.

"Hello, Max," Bagins said.

"Who is this?"

"Robert Bagins. And I’m currently standing in the middle of a battlefield, surrounded by your zombies."

"Robert Bagins." He turned the name over. The recognition arrived without warmth. "The lunatic on the broadcast. The one asking people to come out of their houses and die."

"So you know me."

I kept quiet and listened, because I wanted to see what leverage Bagins thought he was holding this time. The shell held. Outside it the last of the conversion had finished—almost nothing left on the street that still answered to the name of the living. The shop door on the right stayed shut. No light under it. No movement at the frame.

Still closed. And I haven’t seen a single infected out here doing anything unusual.

If Mercury had turned, I’d know. There would be nothing subtle about it.

The thought sat clean and private under the sound of Bagins’ voice. Blue hair behind a locked door. Mercury with her. Both of them still on the right side of the process if the door had held.

"Are you one of the two down there inside the electric shell?" Max asked.

"Yes."

"I’ve been watching it. I was wondering whether it would stop a fireball as well as it stops the dead." A note of real pleasure in his voice—the particular interest of someone who had spent the last few minutes treating the street as a demonstration and had found one surface that refused to participate. "Anyway. Why have you called me?"

"Because I hear all you want is your people inside these walls. And Sinn refused you."

"You’re correct." Max’s voice changed. The pleasure thinned into something closer to attention. "Do you have a way of doing it for me?"

"Not tonight." Bagins let it sit. The shell’s light put a blue edge on his face as he found the next sentence. "But there is a way, if you’ll hear me out."

"I’m listening."

"Sinn is not a man who changes. You’ve spoken to him. You know it. He will not swallow his pride for you, or for me, or for anybody in this city, and he will let every person inside these walls die before he does."

And I heard it under his voice while he said it. The exact appetite I’d watched take Sinn apart in his own office two days ago—the title, the refusal, the particular conviction that being pushed was worse than watching the capital fill with the dead. Bagins was not inventing the diagnosis. He was only deciding what to do with it.

There it is. You’re not negotiating. You’re recruiting.

"He cannot be changed," Bagins said. "But he can be replaced. If you and I work together, Sinn does not stay in that chair. And when I sit in it, the first thing I do, the very first, is open the gates for your people."

"You want to overthrow the government."

"Yes."

"You’re a genius." Max was excited and doing a poor job of hiding it. The pleasure returned, larger this time. "How have I not thought of that?"

"Then let’s work together."

"No infected will touch either of you." Max’s voice was warm now. "We’re on the roof of the building in front of you. Come up. Let’s meet properly."

The line went dead.

Bagins started laughing. The sound was short and raw and completely without the control he had used on the call—the particular release of a man who had walked into a converted street with nothing and was walking out of it with an alliance.

Up on the roof, Ingrid raised both hands and made a gesture.

And every infected in that street turned at once and began walking toward the building.

All of them. Hundreds, moving away from us in a single motion, the same wrong speed they had used when the line broke, now aimed at the doors and the ground-floor openings of the building Max and Ingrid stood on. The road emptied around our shell like water going down a drain. Bodies that had been pressing against the charge a minute ago simply left. The asphalt reappeared in patches. The street lights found ordinary ground again. The continuous low wrong motion of the converted drained toward the building and left the two of us standing inside a shell that no longer had anything to keep out.

"I told you I had it." Bagins couldn’t keep any of it off his face. The first real victory he had been handed since the warehouse emptied into the trucks.

He looked at the clearing street and then at the roof and then at me, and the smile that arrived had nothing of the factory-floor performance left in it.

It’s raining in Goth.

She gave me a password for a man she expects to lose control. That isn’t a warning about temper.

That’s a woman who’s watched him do it before.

Far too early to celebrate.

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