Grey had time to think one word.
’Insects.’
Then the world exploded into teeth.
Richard hit the front of the horde like a battering ram. He had the new bat held crossways in front of him, gripped with both hands, forearms locked, and he used it the way a soldier uses a shield. The first three zombies folded backward against it as if they had run into a moving wall. He didn’t swing. He drove. He put his whole weight into every step, his legs pumping, his boots skidding across the wet stone, and the bodies in front of him buckled and fell and were trampled under those behind.
"Keep moving!" he bellowed. "Keep moving!"
Grey followed in the gap he carved. The moment Richard’s shoulder cleared the first row, Grey slipped in behind him and struck to the left.
His dagger came into his hand in a flash of red light. He drove it into the eye of the nearest zombie with a short, vicious jab, and the strength behind it surprised even him. The blade went through the socket and out the back of the skull with almost no resistance, and the creature dropped without a sound. He wrenched the blade free, spun, and caught the next one at the throat. Its head came halfway off its shoulders.
’Level one,’ he thought, savage and almost giddy. ’Level one, and I’m still stronger than any of you.’
A zombie lunged at his flank. He caught it by the collar, hauled it forward, and drove his knee into its stomach. It flew back three metres and took two others down with it. Another came from the right. He ducked under its outstretched arms, planted his dagger in its temple, shoved the corpse aside, and kept moving.
For a full ten seconds, it worked.
Then the insects arrived.
The first came out of the dark on Richard’s left, and Grey saw it too late to shout. It stood taller than a man, shell dark and glistening like oiled leather, six legs ending in hooked barbs that scraped grooves into the concrete as it charged. Its jaws split open sideways, wet and serrated. Richard swung his bat one-handed and connected with the side of its head. The creature stumbled. It did not fall. Its jaws snapped shut on the bat and held it.
"Uhhh!" Richard yanked. The bat didn’t come free.
Bolt hit it from the side.
The hound went up the creature’s leg in a single bound, claws digging into the chitin, and launched himself across its shell. His jaws found the soft joint where head met neck and clamped down. The insect shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and its jaws opened. Richard ripped the bat loose, spun, and brought it down in a two-handed overhead swing that split the creature’s skull to the eyes.
But there was no time to celebrate it.
They closed in from every side.
Zombies, dozens at a time, hands clawing, mouths open. Between them, the insects: long-limbed roach-like things that scuttled low and fast, a beetle the size of a hatchback that plowed straight through its own kind to reach them, a mosquito, huge and trembling, wings whining in the rain as it dipped its needle-long proboscis toward Richard’s neck.
Richard’s bat caught it in the thorax and it burst.
Grey lost track of what he killed. It became a rhythm, a brutal, shapeless rhythm of stab and step and pull. Dagger in, dagger out. A zombie’s face, an insect’s leg, a hand around his ankle that he stamped into pulp. Rain poured across his eyes, and he wiped them on his wet sleeve and stabbed again. He could hear Bolt’s snarls somewhere ahead of him, could see the hound bounding from shoulder to shoulder, leaping from one zombie’s head to the next, never landing for long enough to kill. Every time he tried to stop and tear out a throat, a dozen hands closed around him, and he wrenched himself free and sprang away.
They were not going to survive this by stopping. Grey knew it. Richard knew it.
"Left!" Richard shouted, breathless. "There, the corner, past the science block!"
Grey saw it. A gap between two low buildings, dark and narrow and maybe forty metres away.
Forty metres. It felt like forty kilometres.
His arm was starting to shake.
He noticed it the way you notice a leak in a roof. The first few dozen kills had cost him nothing. By the fiftieth, the dagger had grown heavier, and the drive behind each stab was slower. His lungs burned. Each breath scraped down his throat like broken glass. A zombie’s fingers raked across his ribs, and the pain came a second late, sharp and hot, and then a hand closed on his sleeve and he ripped free with a gasp, leaving cloth and skin behind.
’Keep going.’
A roach-thing skittered up the back of his leg. He kicked it off and slammed his heel through its shell. A zombie bit at his shoulder. He caught it by the hair and rammed the dagger under its chin. Blood, black and cold, spattered his face and ran into the rain.
Richard was faring no better. Grey could see it in the way his swings had shortened, in the ragged rise and fall of the football chest piece, in the way his knees dipped every time he pushed forward. The bat had lost its shine. Something had torn a long red gash down his left forearm, and every time he lifted the bat, drops of blood ran down the metal and mixed with the rain.
"Grey," Richard gasped. "I can’t..."
"Yes, you can."
"I’m slowing..."
"So am I. Push!"
They pushed. They pushed until the horde stopped being individual creatures and became a single, endless current, dragging at their legs, clawing at their backs, closing in from every direction at once. Grey felt an arm lock around his throat and reached back blindly, driving the dagger into whatever he could find. The arm went slack. Another replaced it. He couldn’t lift his own arms any longer. They hung from his shoulders like wet sandbags, groaning in every joint.
’This is it,’ the thought came, cold and clear. ’This is where it ends. All of it. For a bag of pills and a...’
Something whistled past his ear.
He heard it more than he saw it: a thin, high note of steel cutting the rain. Then a second, and a third, and the zombie in front of him jerked backward with a dagger jutting from each eye socket. Six more went down in the same breath, each struck through the skull by slender blades that streaked out of the dark and returned to the air behind them, quick as swallows.
Ice followed.
A volley of white spikes tore across the courtyard, thick as a man’s arm and sharp as spears. They punched through zombies, pinned insects to the concrete, and shattered against the shell of the giant beetle in a burst of frozen shards. It reared, screaming. A second volley finished it.
Grey turned his head.
Back at the gym doors, small and distant against the lantern glow, two figures stood shoulder to shoulder. Taylor’s hands were outstretched, ice pouring from her fingertips in glittering sheets. Fredrick beside her, one arm thrust forward, and around him hung a halo of blades that flashed and returned and flashed again. Even from here, Grey could see the strain on both their faces.
"GO!" Fredrick’s voice came thin and far across the rain. "GO, YOU IDIOTS!"
The horde had noticed. Half of them had already turned.
Grey didn’t waste the opening. He grabbed Richard by the strap of his chest piece and hauled. "Move!"
They ran.
The back rows of the horde had thinned. What remained were stragglers, a handful of zombies and one wounded insect that dragged itself after them on broken legs. Richard crushed the first one with his shoulder. Grey took the second with the dagger. Bolt shot past them both, leading the way, and the gap between the two low buildings opened up ahead of them, black and narrow and waiting.
They plunged into it.
Rain hammered the corridor between the walls. Water ran ankle-deep across the ground. Behind them, the roar of the horde grew fainter and fainter, and then, abruptly, it was not behind them any more but somewhere off to the side, dragging away like a receding tide.
Grey collapsed against the wall and slid down it, gasping. Richard folded beside him, one hand pressed to his forearm, the other still locked around the bat. Bolt circled them once, tongue lolling, then flopped down across Grey’s boots. He was bleeding from a dozen places.
Nobody spoke.
After a while, Richard laughed. It was a short, cracked sound, more breath than voice.
"We’re... alive," he said.
"For now," Grey said.
Back at the gym, no one saw them go.
The door was shaking.
Silver felt it in her bones before she understood what she was feeling. A single deep boom rolled up through the floor and into the soles of her feet, and then a second, harder one, and the great steel doors bucked against the frame like something alive.
"Close it!" Fredrick was shouting. "Close it, close it, the barricade, the barricade!"
Too late.
They had pulled the horde’s attention. That had been the whole point, hadn’t it? The daggers, the ice, the noise, all of it to draw the eyes away from Grey and Richard for just long enough. It had worked. And it had worked so well that every zombie in the courtyard was now surging toward the only light in the dark.
Toward the doors.
Silver ran. She didn’t remember deciding to. She only remembered the floor rushing beneath her feet, and the cold of the steel against her palms as she slammed into the left door beside Taylor and pushed with everything she had.
John hit the other one. Then Fredrick, his black jacket streaked with rain. Then Mrs. Veronica, her calm face finally cracked with strain, both hands flat against the metal, her long skirt already soaked to the knee.
The boom came again.
The doors jolted inward, an inch, then two, and the noise on the other side reached them as a wall of sound, hundreds of bodies pressing, hundreds of hands pounding, hundreds of mouths pulling at the same broken hunger. Fingers slid through the gap between the doors, ashen and slippery with rain. Taylor slammed her femur down on them, and they disappeared with a wet crunch, and a dozen more took their place.
"The benches!" Taylor screamed. "Get the benches!"
"We can’t leave the door!" John’s voice cracked. "If we let go..."
"Then we don’t let go!"
The steel screamed. Somewhere in the frame, a bolt sheared and rang across the floor like a struck bell. Silver’s arms trembled. Her shoulder ached where it pressed against the metal, but she could feel the door bending, slowly, terribly, into the room, and she knew, the way you know the sky is falling, that in a minute or two the frame would give and the horde would pour in over them.
Behind her, in the gym, people were screaming. She didn’t dare turn. She didn’t dare look at the eleven sick on their mats, the children, the old man with his cardboard fan. She fixed her eyes on the rusting hinge in front of her and felt the folded paper in her pocket press against her hip, thin and unread.
The doors bulged again.
Silver swallowed.
As she realized... This night very much be, their very end.