Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Bagins walked straight through the ten of them toward Max, and his stride never changed once. He even reached out and tapped one on the shoulder as he passed it, the way you’d touch a friend to let him know you were going by. The body didn’t react. The empty face stayed oriented on its sector of the roof. Bagins kept walking.

I stayed near the top of the stairway and watched.

"Max."

Both of them turned, and Bagins went straight into him and hugged him.

The contact was full and uninvited—arms around the younger man’s shoulders, the radio unit still under one of them, the particular enthusiasm of someone who had already decided the alliance was complete and was only waiting for the other party to catch up.

Max’s hands stayed in his pockets the whole time. His body accepted the hug without returning it.

Bagins came out of it, took a step back and offered a hand instead.

Max looked at it for a few seconds before he took it. The handshake was brief. Controlled. The kind that finished the physical requirement of the greeting and left everything else uncommitted.

"Abram." Bagins turned and waved me over.

And that was when Max saw me.

Our eyes locked across the roof. He held it for a second—recognition, the particular stillness of someone rewriting the geometry of a conversation they had accepted on a call—then went back to Bagins.

I started walking, threading through the infected. The evenly spaced bodies held their positions without a tremor. Each one oriented outward. Each one occupying its sector as if the roof had been drawn with a compass and they had been placed on the marks.

He found me in Sherry’s apartment once. Stood in her doorway with a face I couldn’t read.

And I heard him with her outside CGI, the two of them by the wall while my hearing was open. He wanted things from that girl she’d never been able to give him and he’d never once stopped asking.

Bruh, I’m putting Sherry in your hands. She’s vulnerable. Please take care of her. I’ll be in your debt. Forever.

The first thing anyone inside these walls ever asked of me. Before Bala, before Hogsby, before any of it.

"This is Abram." Bagins put a hand out toward me as I arrived. "You’ll like him."

"I know him," Max said.

Ingrid hadn’t moved. She stood at the very edge with her back to all of us, still facing down at the street.

That was the plan. Come up here and take her out, because she’s the one holding them.

And she has not turned around once since we set foot on this roof.

The option sat incomplete. Max in front of me. Bagins at my shoulder with the particular satisfaction of a man who believed the hard part of the night was already finished.

"Abram Nadez." Max faced me. The full use of the name. The particular formality of someone who had decided the personal history and the present negotiation were going to occupy the same sentence whether either of us wanted them to. "I assume you heard everything this man offered me."

He left Bagins and came toward me. The distance closed. The wind at this height moved between us without softening anything.

"I was standing next to him," I said.

"You know, very few people inside these walls can understand me." He stopped in front of me. An inch taller. "They don’t know what it is to be locked outside a wall somebody else raised. They don’t know what it’s like to grow up with more infected around you than people."

He put a hand on my shoulder. The contact was firm. Not hostile.

I listened and took everything I could out of it. The cadence. The controlled volume. The way the sentences arrived already finished, as if he had practiced the shape of this conversation on the walk from wherever he had been standing when Bagins’ broadcast went out.

Bagins came and stood at our side, wearing a small satisfied smile.

"I’m a young man, Bram. But nobody young survives out there. The outside turns you into an old soul before you’ve finished being a boy."

He took his hand off my shoulder and pulled a necklace over his head.

The chain was thin. Dark. He put it into my hands with the same careful motion someone uses to set down something that has been worn against the skin for years and has taken the shape of the body that carried it.

A pendant, and it opened. Becky on one side, years younger. And Sherry on the other, younger too, her hair long enough to fall well below her shoulders.

"I’ve carried a responsibility my whole life." His voice dropped. The wind at the edge of the roof almost took the words. "I’ve done everything I know how to do to protect my people, and the harder I fight for it, the further the whole thing moves away from me."

I looked down at the two faces in my palm. The metal of the pendant was warm from his skin. The photographs were small and exact and completely without the years that had happened since they were taken.

"I’ve just given you that," Max said. "The responsibility. It’s yours now. Because I’m taking on something considerably larger than two girls I love."

"Perfect." Bagins stepped in with it. The satisfaction in his voice had found a new register—the particular tone of a man watching a transfer of power complete itself and already inventorying what it meant for the chair he intended to sit in. "You’ve made the right decision, son."

Max looked at the floor.

Then he lifted his eyes back to mine.

"I have a thousand bodies standing in that street. Bodies that every sane person in this city is terrified of." His voice hadn’t risen at all. "Do you think I can work under another man, Bram?"

I held his eyes and said nothing. The pendant sat open in my palm. Becky. Sherry.

"Do you think I would hand my people to somebody who has never once cared whether they lived?"

He’s not talking to me.

He’s been talking past me since I got here.

And Bagins is standing eighteen inches away smiling at the back of his head.

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