The gym was quieter than it had any right to be.
Rain roared against the roof, a constant, hollow drumming that swallowed every other sound, but beneath it the hall itself held its breath. Lanterns and stubs of candles burned in scattered clusters across the polished floor, and around each of them sat a knot of people. Some wrapped in gym mats, others in the flags and banners the school had left behind, all of them wet, all of them tired.
Grey stood at the mouth of the storeroom corridor and looked at them.
The healthy ones moved softly. A woman knelt beside a cot fashioned from three stacked mats, pressing a damp cloth to a boy’s forehead, and wringing it out into a plastic cup when it warmed. A man sat with his back against the wall, feeding sips of water to someone who could not lift their own head. A girl no older than fifteen fanned a sleeping old man with a torn sheet of cardboard, her lips moving without sound.
And the sick lay between them, in rows, like something the flood had left behind.
Grey had seen fevers. He had burned through one himself once, sweat and flushed skin and a body hot as a stove. Fever burned. That was what made it fever.
These people did not look burned. They looked emptied.
Their skin had gone the colour of candle wax, thin and slightly translucent at the temples, blue veins standing out like cracks in porcelain. Their lips were dry and split. Their chests rose so shallowly that he had to watch a full three breaths to be sure they were rising at all. One man’s hand lay open on the mat beside him, fingers curled inward, and nothing about it moved. Nothing about it looked like it was going to move again.
’A virus doesn’t do that in a day.’
He counted eleven, the way Veronica had said. Then he counted the healthy ones sitting close to them, and the way their hands drifted toward the sick as though pulled. He counted the ones who were not looking at the sick at all, who sat staring at the lanterns with their arms wrapped around themselves.
’Something took it out of them.’
He didn’t know what. He didn’t know why the thought made his skin crawl. Only that Mana had been in the air since yesterday, in the rain, in the things that had tried to eat him, and that nothing in this new world had yet been kind enough to make sense.
His eyes moved from face to face. From the boy on the mat, to the woman tending him, to the old man’s fan...
Something tugged at his shirt.
Grey blinked. Bolt stood beside him, teeth clamped on a fold of his hem, tugging once, twice, with a soft whine. The hound’s ears were pinned back. His eyes weren’t on the sick. They were on Grey.
"I’m fine," Grey muttered.
Bolt let go, huffed through his nose, and nudged his palm with a cold wet muzzle, as if to say, no, you’re not, you’re staring.
He was right. Grey had been staring long enough that the woman with the cloth had noticed. She met his eyes, and something unsure passed across her face, and she looked away first.
’Enough.’
"Grey."
He turned. Silver stood a few steps behind him, her arms folded over her chest, hair still tousled from sleep. She had that look again. The one she wore when she was trying very hard to look like she wasn’t afraid.
"What do I do?" she asked. "While you’re gone."
It was a fair question, and he realised he had no clean answer. Stay alive, was the first thing that came to mind. Don’t trust anyone, was the second. Neither of them sounded like something he could say in a hall full of people who could hear him.
So he reached into his pocket, took out a small square of folded paper, and placed it in her palm.
Silver looked down at it. Then up at him. "What is this?"
"Read it after we leave." His voice dropped. "Not before."
She hesitated, fingers closing around it. "Grey..."
"Not before," he repeated.
A long breath left her. Then she nodded once, slipped it into her pocket, and said nothing more.
Footsteps approached from the far side of the hall. Several of them, unhurried, and Grey knew before he turned whose they were.
Mrs. Veronica led them, her hands folded before her, her expression grave and kind. Fredrick walked at her left, a black jacket hanging off his shoulders, a smirk already tugging at one corner of his mouth. John trailed behind with his arms crossed. Taylor came last, her ice-coated femur hooked over her shoulder like she’d been born holding it.
And Richard.
He looked different. Someone had found him a football chest piece from the equipment room, a hard shell of red plastic that clung to his torso and made his shoulders look even broader than they were. In his right hand was a new bat, metal, gleaming faintly in the lantern glow, its grip wrapped in black tape. He held it well. He looked like a man about to do something important.
He also looked like he’d swallowed something sour.
His eyes found Grey and slid away at once.
’Forty-one percent,’ Grey thought. ’Maybe forty-two.’
The rest weren’t much kinder. John didn’t bother hiding it, jaw tight, lip curled the way people curl it at a landlord. Two of the civilians near the wall had stopped whispering to watch him, and their whispering didn’t sound like praise. The word half went around the hall faster than the rain could keep up.
Grey let it roll off him. People had judged him before. This wasn’t new.
Taylor was the only one who didn’t look at him like that.
She stopped in front of him, empty-eyed, unreadable, and gave him a light nudge on the shoulder with her knuckles. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like a threat either.
"Don’t die," she said.
Nothing else. She stepped back into line as if she had never spoken.
"She’s right, you know," Fredrick said cheerfully, leaning on the wall beside them. "Don’t come back dead, Grey. I’d hate to waste a good funeral on you."
"You won’t need one."
"Good. Although..." He tilted his head, thoughtful. "If you do die, do it with your bag full. Otherwise the whole thing was pointless, and I will be very disappointed."
"Noted."
"Fredrick," Veronica said mildly.
"I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking, Mrs. V."
She let it go with a small sigh, then turned her attention to Grey and Richard, and her eyes, warm and soft and utterly unreadable, moved from one to the other. "You will not be alone in this. We will watch the door until you are out of sight. When you return, Fredrick will open it again. Do not stop to fight what you don’t have to. Take what we need and come back."
"That’s the plan," Grey said.
"May the night be kind to you both."
’It won’t be,’ he thought, but he nodded anyway.
They moved as a group toward the front of the gym. The main doors stood at the end of a short concourse, tall double steel, dented from the inside. Every step closer made the roar of the rain louder, and beneath it, a second sound. Low. Continuous. Something like a crowd murmuring, if that crowd had lost the ability to speak.
The doors were buried under a wall of furniture.
Benches, lockers, a vaulting box, a scoreboard someone had ripped from its mounting. Everything the gym had, stacked, wedged and chained, a barricade that rose almost to the ceiling. Fredrick knocked twice on it with his knuckles.
"Back door’s a lost cause," he said, noticing Grey’s look. "Someone" — he glanced at Richard — "put his shoulder through it yesterday, and we spent half the night piling everything we had against it. It won’t move for anyone, and that includes you. So, the front."
"Uhhh," Richard said, rubbing the back of his neck. "It was a very stubborn door."
"It was a door," Fredrick said kindly.
John and one of the civilians, a broad man whose name Grey had not caught, went to work. The lockers came off first, screaming across the floor. Then the benches, one by one. Behind them, the steel doors began to shudder softly, and somewhere in the noise, Grey heard fingers scraping. Dozens of them. Slow, patient scratching against metal.
Taylor stepped up behind them, a few paces back, ice already crawling over the femur in her hand. Fredrick took position beside her, his smirk fading into something thinner and more focused. Veronica stayed further back, her hands still folded.
Silver stood behind all of them. Grey did not look at her.
Bolt pressed close against his leg. Grey felt the hound’s muscles bunch, felt the low, restrained vibration of a growl held in.
"Ready?" Richard asked, and his voice was steadier than his hands.
"Don’t stop moving," Grey said. "Whatever happens. If you stop, they take you."
Richard nodded and hefted the bat. "Right."
John pulled the last bench free. The civilian slid the iron bar out of its brackets. The two of them looked back at Fredrick, and Fredrick lifted a hand.
"Now."
They threw the doors open.
Grey went through them the way you go through a wall of cold water.
The rain hit him first. Not drops. Sheets. A wall of it, heavy and slanted, slapping into his face and shoulders so hard he thought for a moment he’d been struck. Water poured down his collar and filled his mouth. The sound was total, like standing beneath a waterfall, and every other noise in the world, his own breath, his own heartbeat, Bolt’s paws thundering beside him, drowned inside it.
The night was black. The lantern light from the gym reached a few steps into the courtyard and died, and beyond that the world was shapes: the pale rectangles of buildings, the streaks of rain glowing faint where they crossed the light, and the ground itself, slick and shining, ankle-deep in places, already running like a river.
And in the river, the horde.
Grey saw them all at once. He wished he hadn’t.
They stood in the dark like a forest. Packed shoulder to shoulder, heads lolling, jaws slack, hundreds of them, so many that the courtyard seemed to breathe with them. And they had turned. Every face was turned toward the open doors, toward the noise, toward the light.
"Hold the line!" Richard roared, and dropped his shoulder, and ran.
Grey ran with him, bat and dagger, heart hammering, Bolt a grey blur at his side. The first row of zombies lunged. He heard the crack of Richard’s bat, the wet crunch of bone, and then...
Something else moved in the dark.
Something too tall to be a man. Something with too many legs. Something that clicked, a sound like wet knuckles cracking, as a pale, chitinous shape rose out of the crowd and turned its glistening head toward him.
Not just zombies.
The horde had brought company.