Kendrick had stopped feeling his arms a long time ago.
He held his sister anyway. He held her against his chest with both of them wrapped around her, his chin resting on her damp hair, and he did not let go, not when the doors boomed, not when the floor shook beneath the mat, not when somebody near the wall started screaming and did not stop.
She was so cold.
That was what he could not get past. Not the noise, not the dark, not the steel groaning at the far end of the hall like a ship being crushed. It was how cold she was. When they had reached the gym, soaked and shivering, her hands had been warm in his. She had been laughing at how badly he was shaking. Now her skin felt like the inside of a fridge, and her lips had gone the colour of ash, and every breath that left her came thin and slow, as if each one might be the last one she had left to give.
He remembered the moment the stranger had stared at her.
Hours ago. The tall one with the dog, standing at the mouth of the storeroom corridor, his eyes moving over every sick face in the hall. They had settled on his sister for too long. She had lifted her head, barely, drawn by it, and met his gaze, and Kendrick had wanted to shout at him, to ask what he was looking at, what he thought he was seeing.
Now he understood. The stranger had been looking at a dead woman.
He pulled his sister closer.
The hall around him had stopped pretending.
Near the far wall, a mother had gathered her three children under a single blanket and pressed their faces into her sides, her hands clamped over the smallest one’s ears. She was rocking. Her lips moved without sound. Two rows over, an old man in a suit jacket sat bolt upright on a folded mat, staring at the ceiling, and Kendrick realised he was counting the rivets. A girl, barely older than himself, had hidden behind a stack of folded chairs with her knees pulled to her chin, and she was crying so quietly that he only knew because her shoulders shook.
Others had stopped crying. That was worse.
They sat where they were, upright or slumped, faces slack, eyes fixed on the doors with the flat calm of people who had already done the maths. A man near the aisle whispered something to no one, and it took Kendrick a moment to understand it was an apology. To someone. To everyone. A woman beside him had taken off her wedding ring and was turning it over and over in her fingers.
And beyond all of them, at the doors, the ones who had chosen to stand.
Kendrick could see them through the gap between two cots. Mrs. Veronica pressed against the left panel with both palms flat, her composed face torn apart by effort. The tall man in black, Fredrick, shoulder-deep against the steel, his teeth bared. John beside him. The woman with the ice, Taylor, screaming something he couldn’t hear. And a girl with tousled hair whose name he did not know, who threw her whole weight against the door again and again as if she could hold the world shut with her body.
There were five of them. Against that.
’It’s not enough,’ the thought came. ’It was never going to be enough.’
His sister stirred in his arms. Her lashes fluttered. Her lips parted, and a breath, or the ghost of one, brushed his collarbone.
"Sis?" His voice cracked. "Sis, I’m here. I’m here."
She didn’t answer. She only leaned a little more of her weight into him, the way she used to when they were small and it stormed and the power went out.
Kendrick’s eyes burned. He pressed his cheek to her forehead.
"I’m sorry," he whispered. "I’m so sorry. I couldn’t save them..."
The words came out of him in a rush, and once they started, he couldn’t stop them. Everyone they had left behind on the road. Everyone who had been alive that morning. All the faces he had run past because running was all he’d had. "I couldn’t save them. And I can’t... I can’t even save you."
Somewhere behind him a child began to wail.
Then the sound came.
It was not a bang. It was the shriek of a bolt being torn out of its socket, followed by a deep, metallic groan that rolled through the whole hall like the world’s biggest door being pulled from its hinges. Kendrick lifted his head.
The steel doors bulged inward.
For one long, suspended heartbeat they hung there, bent like a bow, rain and lantern light and hands, so many hands, reaching through the seam...
Then they exploded off their frame.
Panels of iron sailed across the floor. Benches flew. The five at the door were flung backward like leaves, and the night rushed in, wet and roaring, carrying with it the smell of rot and river water and something sweet and awful, and behind it, filling the entire doorway from top to bottom, the horde.
Kendrick saw the first wave pour through.
He didn’t look away. He couldn’t. He only tightened his arms around his sister, shut his mouth around a scream that would not come, and watched death cross the gym floor.