Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

I dropped the shield.

The charge collapsed in a single clean motion. The blue edge vanished. Ordinary night air replaced it—colder, carrying the residual smell of burned fabric and the continuous low sound of hundreds of bodies still filing toward the building.

We stood out on the open road with the last of them still moving past us, and not one of them turned its head.

"Wait here for me." Bagins was already heading back down the road toward the abandoned column. "I’m getting my equipment out of the car. Max will love this."

He carried the same excitement he’d had when I agreed to work with him. He’d simply moved all of it onto a blond man he’d never met, in under four minutes.

I walked out to the middle of the road and looked up.

Can he see me from there? Does he know it’s me down here?

Max and I had started well. He’d put a hand out to me before either of us crossed the walls, when we were both just people from outside with nothing. Somewhere between then and now Sherry had ended up standing between us, and the last time we were within arm’s reach of each other he’d had his hand around my throat.

Bagins came back with the radio unit under his arm and we started for the building. The C-shaped device sat on top of it.

"With an army like this," he said, "I’ll never have to push another human being into a war again. These things can fight every battle I’ve got left."

"Isn’t it early to be counting on them? Max hasn’t actually agreed to anything yet."

"Don’t be negative, Abram." He nodded up at the roof. The blonde head and the bald one still visible against the dark sky. "Did you not hear his voice? The boy was thrilled. He’s been waiting for someone to say that to him for days."

I couldn’t argue with that part. The warmth on the line. The speed of the invitation.

We walked into them.

Hundreds now, maybe closer to a thousand, filling the ground around the building. The converted from Bagins’ army mixed with the ones that had been held here all night—scraps of warehouse clothes beside scraps of army uniform, all of them moving with the same low wrong patience toward openings that would take them inside.

We moved between them the way you move through a crowd on an ordinary street. Shoulders brushed. A hand swung past my arm without closing. One of them turned its face toward me as I passed—empty eyes, jaw slightly open—and turned away again as if the information had been received and filed as irrelevant.

"What was that you were saying about a Mary something?" Bagins asked, calm and pleasant, in a tone I couldn’t have produced tonight if you’d paid me. The radio unit sat under his arm like a briefcase. He walked through the converted as if they were already his.

I looked up.

Ingrid and Max were both watching us come. Two figures on the edge of the roof, upright, oriented, the street light from below catching the blonde hair and the pale curve of the bald head.

Bagins slapped a female infected across the backside as we went past her.

The sound was short and ugly and completely alone in the low continuous motion of the mass. She didn’t react at all. The body continued toward the building without adjusting its path.

He laughed. "They can’t touch me. I’m the boss of their boss now."

"That was stupid."

"They can’t do anything." He reached the base of the stairs. They ran up the outside of the building, open, exposed—metal, utilitarian, the kind that had been bolted on for fire access and never meant for this. The first flight rose into the dark above the mass. "I think you’re worried I’ll forget about you once I’m Lord of the walls."

What?

The sentence landed and sat there. He went up ahead of me with one hand on the railing. The radio unit shifted under his other arm. The metal steps rang once under his boots and then settled into a steady rhythm.

"Where are your girls, incidentally?"

The building was considerably taller than it had looked from the road. Each flight opened another section of the district—shuttered shopfronts, the abandoned truck column, the dark stretch of road we had walked on foot after the thorns. The air cooled as we rose. The sound of the mass below thinned.

"I don’t know."

He stopped and turned around on the step above me. The street light from below laid his face in hard upward shadow. The tired eyes. The residual blood.

"You’re a bad liar. You came back into a warehouse full of armed men for her." He studied my face. "There’s no version of you standing here this calm without knowing exactly where they are."

"Fine. I know where they are."

I gave him what he wanted and kept climbing. The admission cost nothing useful to him and kept the conversation from growing teeth on an open staircase with hundreds of infected below it. His boots resumed their rhythm above me. The railing under my hand was cold and slightly sticky with old paint.

I looked down over the railing as we rose. The infected below spread out around the foot of the building, loose, aimless, waiting on somebody else’s decision. The precision of the held line was gone. What remained was the low continuous motion of things that had been told to wait in a different configuration and had not yet been given the next instruction.

Then up. Bagins reached the top and stepped off onto the roof slab. His silhouette against the dark sky for a second, then gone over the edge of the last flight.

I stopped one flight below.

From up here I couldn’t find the shop door. Too many roofs in the way, too much dark. The angle was wrong. The street we had fought on was a geometry of street lights and abandoned vehicles, and the doorway Venna and Mercury had taken was somewhere in it that the height had erased.

I pulled my comms out and typed.

If I’m not with you in thirty minutes, move.

Sent. Pocket. The screen went dark against my palm. The message was the only version of a promise I had time for—practical, conditional, the particular shape of an instruction that assumed the worst without requiring me to name it out loud on an open staircase.

I climbed the last flight.

The roof slab opened under my boots. Open sky. The continuous low wind that lived at this height and had nothing to do with the streets below. Max and Ingrid stood at the far edge with their backs to us, still facing down at the street.

Ten infected stood spread across the open roof, evenly spaced, none of them moving. The spacing was exact—too exact for accident, too regular for the ordinary drift of the converted.

Evenly spaced.

Nothing about the last two days has been accidental and neither is that.

Bagins was already walking toward the far edge with the radio unit under his arm. Max and Ingrid had not turned around yet.

Something still wasn’t sitting right, and I still couldn’t name it.

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