Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

We came off the last step onto the ground.

Another one joined the first, and the two of them got hands on me and lifted.

The grip was absolute—four hands. My boots left the asphalt. The sky rotated into view above the mass of converted bodies filing past the base of the building. One star in the whole of it, one, and the groaning came up around me from every side until it was the only thing in the world.

Then a metal door, somewhere off to the right, opening. The sound was short and ordinary and completely out of place—hinges, the particular complaint of iron that had been used before and would be used again.

The two of them carried me a short distance and stopped, and I felt them swing me. Once. Twice, further. The sky swung with the motion. The star held its position. My body found the rhythm of the swing and braced for the end of it.

The impact came across my ribs.

Iron bars. I bounced off them and landed badly and my eyes started working again—metal, close, the particular geometry of a space that had been measured for a body and built slightly smaller than the body required. My shoulder took the secondary impact. The pendant stayed closed in my fist.

A cage.

Door still open, the two of them standing outside it looking in at me with nothing on their faces.

And something was wrong about it. It moved. A small shift under my weight when I rolled, the whole structure giving slightly, the way nothing sitting on solid ground gives. Not a cell bolted to a floor.

Ingrid came through the two of them.

She looked at me for a moment—the young face, the tattoo curving from behind her ear into the hollow of her collarbone, the letters still unreadable at this angle—then swung the door shut and put a padlock through it.

The click was soft and final. The two infected that had carried me turned away without being told and were absorbed back into the mass.

"Hey."

She didn’t answer.

She turned and walked back into the infected. The mass closed around her the way water closes around a hand. The pale curve of her bald head disappeared between shoulders and the continuous low motion of bodies.

I looked up.

The roof of it was a hand above my head. No standing. Whoever built this had measured a man and taken the difference out—the exact height of a sitting body plus the minimum clearance required to keep the head from striking metal. The bars were thick and set wide enough to see straight through, and the sky sat right there beyond them. The single star. The open dark. The particular insult of a prison that left the whole of the night visible and completely unreachable.

The front was covered. The sides weren’t.

Behind me, hundreds of them, standing ready to move.

On my right, past the door, Ingrid was giving instructions. The mass adjusted around her words without visible command. Bodies shifted. Gaps opened and closed.

I turned to my left.

There was another cage there. Or the same one, divided, the bars I was leaning against simply cutting the thing in half.

Except that half had a chair in it. Welded to the base. Bolted through at the feet. Facing forward.

And no roof over it at all. Open to the sky.

A chair.

Bars on my side. A seat on that one.

This wasn’t built tonight. Somebody made this.

The noise from the crowd died away. Then, from behind me, hooves on asphalt.

I turned my head.

Max Donman came through them on a horse.

A horse.

In a capital full of vehicles, with four trucks sitting a hundred metres back up that road with the keys still in them.

He isn’t moving. He’s arriving. Every one of these things is going to walk into that city behind a man on horseback, and every person watching from a window is going to see exactly one figure above the crowd.

The infected opened up and let him through and closed behind him. The animal was dark and calm, the particular stillness of something that had been trained not to care what moved around its feet.

He stopped beside my cage.

Bagins’ radio unit was under his arm.

"Are they ready?" he called.

Ingrid came out of the mass of them.

"All of them. Every one."

"Then let’s move."

She started, then stopped mid-step and turned back like she’d forgotten something. The mass held. The horse shifted its weight once and settled. Max looked down at me.

The horse put his head a long way above mine, and I was sitting on a metal floor with my back against the bars.

And that’s the other reason for the roof.

"You good?"

"I’m good."

"You seemed to enjoy your little outing with Bagins." He shifted the radio unit under his arm. "I want you to enjoy the real journey properly."

I said nothing. The pendant stayed closed in my fist against the metal floor.

"By dawn these walls will have a new government."

I still said nothing. The infected around us held their formation.

"I imagine you’re asking yourself what that makes you." A small smile arrived on his face.

First time I’ve ever seen him do that.

"You’re officially the first prisoner of my government."

"Sinn isn’t an easy man to convince," I said. "You may find you need me when you want those doors opened."

He laughed. Short, genuine.

"Bram, those doors will open tonight. And Sinn is going to beg me for mercy before they do." He looked down at me. The horse’s head blocked a section of the sky. "I promise you that."

Ingrid came back through the crowd, hurrying now. The mass parted for her the way it had parted for the horse.

"Watch and learn," Max said, and the horse moved off.

Ingrid came around the outside of my cage and climbed up the other side.

She sat down in the chair.

The bars between us were close enough that I could have touched her shoulder through them. The welded seat faced forward. The open sky sat above her bald head without a roof to interrupt it.

She didn’t look at me once. She faced forward, put both hands flat on her knees, and waited.

And the whole thing lurched forward.

It’s a cart.

I’m in a cart and something is pulling it.

The infected started moving all at once, around us and ahead of us and behind us, and the street filled with the sound of a thousand people walking.

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