Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The password Becky had given me sat behind my teeth with the last of the air I had.

I forced it up through a throat that wasn’t opening.

"It... is raining... in Goth."

The pressure tightened. My hands went to something with no surface to it, nothing to grip, nothing to pull at, and after a second my arms stopped believing there was anything there and gave up on their own. Vision narrowed to a hard white point.

"What did you say?"

Something came apart in his voice on the second word. The control that had held every sentence since we set foot on the roof cracked along one edge. The pressure on my throat didn’t ease. It only paused, as if the hand that wasn’t there had forgotten what it was doing mid-act.

"Say it again."

I couldn’t. He hadn’t left me the air to. The words sat behind the closed architecture of my neck with nowhere to go.

Then all of it released at once and I dropped and hit the concrete on my side.

The impact drove what little air remained out of me and then the real breathing started. Both hands went to my neck. I dragged breath in and it came in strips, and every one of them hurt more than not breathing had hurt.

His boots crossed the roof toward me.

"What did you just say to me?"

They stopped beside my head. The concrete under my cheek was cold. The pendant sat a hand’s width from my face, open, Sherry’s side up.

I still had nothing.

Four words.

I have watched that man throw a body across a roof without turning his head. I have watched him stop a charge in mid-air while looking somewhere else. Nothing on this building slowed him by a fraction of a second.

And a sentence about weather took his hand off my throat.

"Ingrid."

My vision cleared in pieces. The open sky. The ten infected still holding their sectors as if none of the last ninety seconds had required them to adjust. Max’s boots beside my head.

"Let’s go. We’re taking him as a prisoner."

Ingrid turned around.

And from the floor, finally, I saw her.

Younger than Becky. Considerably younger, and that landed wrong, because everything about the way she’d held that street belonged to somebody twice her age.

And running down from behind her ear, across the side of her neck and into the hollow of her collarbone, a tattoo. Small letters, tight and even, a full sentence of them. Dark against her skin.

I lay there and tried to read it.

It was the only thing in reach. Something to put my mind on that wasn’t a throat that had stopped working and a man in pieces eight metres behind me.

The angle was wrong. The light from below threw the letters into uneven shadow. I got the shape of a first word and lost it when she shifted her weight, and the rest of it curved away under her collarbone into the dark of her collar.

"Do we carry him as he is," Ingrid said, "or do we convert him?"

"He’s a prisoner." Max didn’t look back at me. His attention was already on the stairs, on the next piece of the night. "I want him sane."

"He’ll slow us down. Significantly."

"Ingrid."

Her jaw moved. The tattoo shifted with it and the unfinished sentence on her neck disappeared further into shadow.

"Okay."

She crossed to the ten and stopped in front of one of them and spoke close to its ear. Words I couldn’t reach from where I was—low, precise, the particular cadence of someone giving an instruction to a thing that no longer required persuasion.

Max was already at the stairs.

Ingrid went after him. Then nine of them peeled off and followed her in a line, and their footsteps went down the outside of the building and faded.

One stayed exactly where it was.

I lay on the concrete and let one thing arrive properly.

I am alive because of a sentence a woman said to me on a phone.

Nothing I did. Not the charge, not the shield, not the plan. Becky.

The last of the nine went out of sight over the edge of the first flight. The roof returned to the wind and the open sky and the single infected standing in its sector with its empty face fixed on the living body still on the slab.

I watched it come and I had nothing gathered at all.

I’d fought him before. Mr Kim’s job. Mary Stam bleeding beside me, Max and Becky coming at us in CGI colours. We’d both walked out on our own legs.

This wasn’t that man.

Whatever he’d become since then had happened somewhere I hadn’t been looking.

It bent down and took hold of my arm.

The grip was absolute—fingers that no longer adjusted for the comfort of the thing they held, only for the requirement of moving it.

My free hand went out and found the pendant on the concrete and closed around it before the pull came.

Then it started walking.

My legs came off the concrete behind me and my shoulder took the weight and the whole roof began sliding past at ground level. The slab. The open sky. All of it moving past my face at the speed of an infected that had been told to deliver a package and had no opinion about the package’s condition on arrival.

And I passed him.

Not all of him. There wasn’t a version of Bagins left to pass. Just the wide dark spread of him across the slab, and a clean patch in the middle of it where the radio unit had been.

Max had picked it up.

He’d stepped through what was left of a man, taken it off the concrete, and carried it down those stairs with him.

My fist tightened around the pendant.

Can I use charge at all?

[ No. ]

Where’s it taking me?

[ To whatever prison Max referred to. ]

[ Relax. Vitality restoration in progress. ]

By relax, you mean accept the arrest.

[ Yes. ]

My back hit the first step.

Then the second.

Then a rhythm started, one edge at a time, all the way down the spine—metal, impact, the continuous short violence of a body being taken down a flight of stairs by something that did not adjust its stride for the living weight it dragged.

I made myself go loose against it because fighting it would only cost me what I had left. The pendant stayed closed in my fist. The photographs pressed against the skin of my palm. Sherry’s face. Becky’s.

Thirty minutes. I gave Mercury thirty minutes.

She’ll wait longer. She always waits longer, and one day it’s going to kill her.

Step. Step. Step.

The flights continued. The sound of the mass at the base of the building grew louder as we descended—the low continuous motion of close to a thousand bodies waiting on somebody else’s decision.

Okay.

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