“R!”
I blink water out of my eyes. Julie is pulling on my arm, trying to drag me across the street. But then M and Tomsen and Nora and Addis are running back toward us, away from an oncoming parade of disemboweled horrors. There is no clear direction to run. The Dead are everywhere.
Bullets zip through the space between us and slap into the nearest corpses and I see my friends flinging themselves backward to avoid the line of fire. Julie yanks me to the ground. We crawl out of the street and huddle against a wall until the shooting moves elsewhere, and when we stand up again, I can’t see the others.
“Nora!” Julie shouts, but if Nora replies, it’s lost in the gunfire and rain. The rain is not soft anymore. It’s becoming a roar.
“Nora!”
The Dead appear to be ignoring us, too focused on the men shooting at them, but the riot around us is impenetrable. Julie is on her tip-toes, scanning frantically, but her eyes barely reach the average chest. In another life we’d be at a concert, and she would struggle to see the band until I lift her up on my shoulders, and then she’d bend down and kiss my forehead and pump her fists to the beat. In this life, she screams her friend’s name and claws at the tall zombie blocking her view. When he spins around and snarls at her, I smash his face with my elbow and he collapses, drastically reduced in stature.
“Hold on,” I tell her. I stretch to my full height and skim the top of the crowd. The soldiers have formed a perimeter around their vehicles and managed to keep the center clear. Some of the more sentient Dead are starting to notice the rising piles of corpses and are turning around and retreating like creatures who value their existence. The shriveled black transitionals still provide a steady stream of targets, hissing and wheezing and clawing the air with skinless fingertips, but there is enough breathing room that some of the soldiers have run off in pursuit of the fleeing Ardents.
I observe all this as black-and-white static around the bright red center of my attention.
“Do you see them?” Julie says, reading the alarm in my face.
I see them.
M’s polished dome towers above the crowd. Nora’s buoyant hair bobs next to it. The swirling currents of bullets and teeth have pushed them inside Axiom’s perimeter, and they shuffle toward a van with guns at their backs.
Bracing myself for Julie’s reaction, I deliver my report: “Captured.”
“No.” She grinds her teeth, straining to see for herself. “God damn it, no!”
I can’t say I’m surprised when she charges in after them.
-
I PROTECT JULIE and Julie protects me. This has always been the bargain. When a man twice her size goes in for the kill, I smash his face, and when my wandering mind leaves my body unoccupied, she drags me away from the bullets. It’s a good arrangement, and I believe it still holds, but this would be a very bad time to test it. As we shove our way through the stampede of the Dead, I remind myself for the hundredth time that I’m not immune to the invisible venom that’s coursing through their teeth. All it takes is a nip. One moment of distraction and my new life ends, erased and reset to gray like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch.
Let it happen, the wretch mumbles. Get us out of this mess you’ve made, all this pain and guilt and embarrassment. Wasn’t it easier in the gray?
I’m not finished, I tell him. I have to fix what we broke.
You tried, he sighs. It was too hard.
I squeeze my eyes shut to slam the basement door, and when I open them a second later, a Dead man is lunging for my throat. I fling him into the mud and stomp a boot into his kneecaps while the wretch chuckles sourly.
Normally I’d be more aggressive, smashing skulls and stomping brains, but knowing that these corpses still have people in them complicates combat. Most look like they don’t even want to be here; I see more confusion than hunger and some are trying to turn back, but the oily black proto-Boneys push forward with such ferocity it sweeps them up in the current.
In prison and afterward, I learned countless ways to kill with my hands. I resist them now. The Dead are focused on Axiom, so a well-placed kick to the back is all it takes to move them. But when we break through into the square…what then? Does Julie have a plan? It’s hard to imagine any outcome better than joining our friends in captivity. Maybe that’s all she wants.
A burst of gunfire goes off close enough to muffle my hearing. We are suddenly an island in a lake of fallen bodies.
“Stop right there.”
The voice brings a crazed chuckle to my throat. In my mind this man was gone; I wished him well and cut him loose to live out his days in the empty isolation he craved. But here he is again, standing at the mouth of an alley with two other men in beige jackets, rifle raised, eyes empty.
“I do not fucking believe this,” Julie says, staring at Abram Kelvin through mats of rain-soaked hair.
“Shut up,” Abram barks. “Hands against the wall.”
Gritting her teeth, Julie obeys. I do likewise, but I watch him over my shoulder.
“Cover me,” he tells the other soldiers, and they turn around to face the swarm. Abram pulls my hands behind my back and slaps cuffs on my wrists.
“You absolute motherfucker,” she hisses as the steel snaps into her flesh. “You can’t be back with them.”
“I’m with whoever I have to be,” he mutters.
“Abram.” The softness in my voice makes him pause. “We found Sprout.”
It’s like I’ve uttered a spell that freezes time.
“Where is she?”
“Let us go and we’ll show you.”
The swarm has thinned. All the fresher Dead have either fled or been killed. What remains is isolated groups of hobbling, flesh-coated skeletons, and the convoy is picking them off one by one. One of Abram’s partners turns and frowns. “You know these people, Roberts?”
“Met them this morning when I was scouting. They preached at me for a while.”
“Well move it along, man, we’re wrapping up here.”
Abram raises his rifle and jabs it at me. “Move.”
He stays behind us with the gun in my back while the other two walk a few paces in front, scanning the corpse-strewn streets.
“I’m not lying,” I tell him. “She’s with us.”
“I believe you,” he says under his breath. “And I’ll get her when we’re done here.”
“You don’t know where—”
“Could she possibly be in the big yellow parade float parked behind the bookstore? Not exactly a stealth transport.”
“Abram,” Julie says quietly, her anger melting into sheer confusion and hurt. “Why are you doing this?”
No reply. Boots squelching in blood-reddened mud.
“I could believe you’d ditch us in New York but not that you’d go back to them. You’re an asshole but you’re not an idiot.”
“It’s temporary,” he growls. “Means to an end.”
“What end? Finding Sprout? You found her! Drop these fuckers and let’s get out of here.”
Abram glances past her. The two soldiers are occupied with the surrounding situation; the hiss of the rain muffles our voices. “It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, because it feels good to be back in the machine, doesn’t it? Nice and safe on the winning side?”