Grey had not stopped moving in a very long time.
He and Richard had left the courtyard behind, and the dark streets took them in like a throat. Rain still came down in sheets, and the water ran down the gutters in dark, glittering ropes, spilling across cracked asphalt and pooling around the wheels of cars that had been left where their drivers had abandoned them. Traffic lights hung dead above the intersections. A shop window lay in glittering fragments across a pavement, its mannequins tipped over inside, still smiling.
They kept to the corners. Alley to alley, wall to wall, cutting behind lecture blocks and through a cafe whose door swung open on a single hinge. Every few minutes the horde’s howl swelled behind them, thin and hungry, and then faded again as they put another street between it and themselves.
The stragglers found them anyway.
A lone zombie stumbled out from behind a bus shelter, half its jaw gone, arms swinging. Richard stepped forward without a word, and his bat came round in a flat, brutal arc that took its head clean off the shoulders. It dropped. He didn’t slow. Two more came out of a doorway further along, and he crushed the first against the wall with his shoulder and put the bat through the second’s temple before it could raise its arms.
Grey watched, his dagger hanging loosely at his side.
’He barely needed me.’
It should have been reassuring. It wasn’t. Every time the bat came down, Grey saw the same thing: a man with a body built for exactly this, who had somehow found a way to make it look easy, when moments ago it had almost killed him. His forearm was still bleeding. Not a lot. Enough that the water running off his elbow was faintly pink.
Grey’s own ribs throbbed with every step. His left shoulder had gone numb. He kept his breathing shallow and steady and refused to let any of it reach his face.
They turned another corner. Bolt padded ahead, ears flat, nose lifted to the wind. His fur was matted dark with rain and other things, and he was limping ever so slightly on his front left.
"Grey."
He didn’t look back. "What."
"Stop. Just for a minute."
He kept walking.
"Grey." Richard’s voice was rougher now. "Please."
"We stop, we die."
"We’re going to die anyway if we keep going like this!" Richard’s boots scraped to a halt. Grey heard the bat hit the ground with a clang. "Look at us. Look at yourself. You can’t even lift your left arm."
That made him stop.
He turned. Richard stood under the awning of a shuttered store, chest heaving, hand clamped over his forearm, soaked to the bone. There was blood in the water pooling around his boots. Behind him the rain was so heavy it turned the streetlamps into pale smudges.
"Five minutes," Richard said. "I’m not asking for an hour."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because every minute we waste, someone in that gym gets closer to dying."
"And you care about that?" Richard laughed, short and bitter. "You? You asked for half."
Grey said nothing.
"You know what that looked like? I stood there and watched a man take half of what a room full of dying people needs, and then have the nerve to tell me it was fair." Richard’s voice shook. It wasn’t the shaking of exhaustion. "I didn’t argue. Do you know why? Because you’d just saved us. Because I owed you. Because Mrs. Veronica said yes, and I thought, maybe she knows something I don’t." He shook his head. "I’ve been thinking about it the whole way. It doesn’t sit right, Grey. It’s never going to sit right."
Grey watched him. Rain ran down his face and dripped off his chin. He let Richard talk.
"We’re not machines," Richard went on. "You can’t just keep going and going and expect us to keep up. You’re bleeding, too. I saw it. You think I didn’t notice? And you keep walking like it doesn’t hurt, like the rest of us are just... tools you can spend. And that’s fine, maybe that’s how you survived, maybe that’s what got you this far. But we’re not that. We’re people." His hand curled into a fist against his side. "Just because you saved us doesn’t mean you get to treat us like we’re less than human."
The rain filled the silence he left behind.
Bolt had come back and sat by Grey’s feet, looking from one of them to the other with his head tilted. Somewhere in the distance the horde howled again, small and faint.
Grey’s face didn’t change.
’He isn’t wrong.’ It was a strange thought to have, and a stranger one to have calmly. ’About the half, about the pace, about most of it. He’s just not angry about the right thing.’
He had watched Richard for a whole day. He had watched the way his eyes flinched when someone mentioned the gym. He had watched the way the man carried something behind his words, a weight he kept shifting from one shoulder to the other and never quite set down. The fifty percent had bruised him, sure. But it was not what had put a crack in his voice.
"You’re not angry at me about that," Grey said.
Richard blinked. "What?"
"The half. That’s not what’s eating you." Grey’s voice was low, even, almost gentle, and somehow that made it worse. "You’d have swallowed it. You’ve swallowed worse today. It bothers you, but it isn’t what’s making your hands shake."
"I don’t know what you..."
"The boy on that woman."
Richard stopped.
"In the gym, when we cleared it. The cafeteria lady, and the boy fused into her stomach." Grey held his eyes. "You said his name. You said, that’s Tim. Did you know him?"
Everything in Richard’s face fell apart at once.
It did not happen slowly. One second he stood there, tall and broad and furious, the bat at his feet and the rain hammering against his chest piece. Then something inside him gave way, and his shoulders dropped, his jaw slackened, and the fury drained out of him like water from a broken jug. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. He raised one shaking hand to cover his eyes.
"He was in my department," Richard said, and his voice broke down the middle. "Quiet kid. Always sat in the back. Always had earphones in."
Grey said nothing.
"We used to... me and the guys... it started as a joke." The words came in fragments. "Someone knocked his books out of his hands once, and he didn’t say anything, so we did it again, and then it was, I don’t know, a thing we did. Every day. His bag in the fountain. His chair pulled away. I never hit him. I told myself that. I never hit him, I just... laughed. I stood there and I laughed."
He was crying now. It poured down his face without a sound, mixing with the rain, dripping from his jaw onto the red plastic of the chest piece.
"That morning," he said. "The morning of the Overload. We cornered him in the hallway before the second lecture. I don’t even remember why. I said something, I don’t know what, something about how nobody would care if he stopped showing up. And he just looked at me, Grey. He just looked at me, and then he picked up his bag and walked out. Left early. Went to the gym, because that’s where he went when he wanted to be alone."
His voice cracked and dissolved.
"And when the sky broke, he was already there. Alone. Because of me." Richard’s hand fell away from his face. His eyes, red and swollen, found Grey’s, pleading, terrible. "I saw what it did to him. I saw what he became. And every time I close my eyes, I see him walking out of that hallway and I think... I did that. I put him in that place."
He sank onto his heels beneath the awning and covered his head with both arms, shoulders shaking.
Grey watched him.
He didn’t step forward. He didn’t reach out. He stood in the rain with his aching shoulder and his dead-quiet face, and he let Richard hurt. He let the silence stretch. He had no comforting words, and he knew better than to fake them. Instead he simply stood there and watched a giant of a man tear himself apart on the pavement, and did not look away.
A long time passed.
Then, quietly, Grey said, "It isn’t your fault."
Richard’s shoulders stilled.
"The Overload didn’t choose who it took. It didn’t ask who’d been kind, and who hadn’t." Grey’s voice was flat, and that flatness was the only reason it could be heard at all. "If Tim had been in the library, he’d have died there. If he’d been with you, he’d have died with you. You didn’t put him in that place. The sky did."
"I made him leave..."
"You were cruel to him. That’s true. That’s yours, and you’ll have to carry it." Grey crouched slowly, ignoring the scream of his ribs, until he was eye level with Richard. "But you’re not the one who killed him. And you can’t bring him back. Neither can I."
Richard lifted his head.
"But there are people in that gym," Grey said. "There’s a girl who asks you every hour if her mother’s coming back. There’s a whole hall of them waiting on something you can carry through a door." He held Richard’s eyes. "You can’t save Tim. You can save them. That’s what you have left. So save them."
For a moment Richard only stared at him, face wet, mouth working.
"Besides," Grey added, "the fifty percent I’m taking is the smaller half."
Richard blinked.
"Do the maths. I get half. You get to hand out the rest and be the good guy." Grey shrugged. "I’m the greedy bastard. You just get to walk in with the medicine and be a hero. Honestly, you got the better deal."
Silence.
Then, from somewhere deep in Richard’s chest, something cracked. A wet, startled huff of breath that turned into a laugh, and then into a full, helpless one, and he dropped his forehead onto his arm and laughed until his shoulders shook.
"That’s..." he gasped. "That’s the worst pep talk I’ve ever heard."
"You’re still laughing."
"I hate you."
"I know."
Bolt, apparently deciding the mood had turned safe, padded over and pushed his head under Richard’s hand. Richard let out a breathless sob that was half a laugh, and scratched him behind the ear.
Grey rose slowly. Then the system chimed at the edge of his vision, soft and silvery.
{Bloodline system: Form a bond with Richard to copy his ability}
{Progress: 90%. Richard feels trust and deep respect}
Grey stared at the number.
Ninety. Only ten short of a bond. It was more than he had ever gotten from any of them. Higher, even, than he had hoped for when he walked out of the gym.
And the strange thing was that he hadn’t said any of it for the number.
’Not all of it.’ He turned the thought over once, uncomfortably, and then set it aside. It would keep. Everything did, in this world. Everything except the people waiting for them.
"Come on," he said, and held out his good hand.
Richard looked at it for a while. Then he took it, and Grey hauled him upright, and for a second they stood there, two soaked, broken men beneath a shuttered store awning, neither of them quite meeting the other’s eyes.
"Thanks," Richard muttered.
"Don’t."
"Fine. I won’t."
They picked their way forward. The rain had begun to thin, a little, from sheets to curtains, and the sky at the far edge of the world had faded from black to a deep, bruised blue. Their footsteps slapped through the water. Bolt trotted ahead, limping less now, or perhaps only pretending.
They crossed two more streets. Passed a burned-out van. Slipped between a row of dead vending machines and the wall of the science faculty, and then the alley opened up, and Richard stopped so suddenly that Grey almost walked into him.
"That’s it."
Grey lifted his eyes.
It stood at the end of the lane, wide and low and dark, a vast rectangle of corrugated steel and rust-streaked concrete. Its loading shutters were sealed, its roof sagging under the weight of the storm, its old sign hanging crooked over the entrance, half of its letters missing. Water sheeted off the roof and roared into the gutters below. Nothing moved.
The warehouse.
"That’s where they stored everything," Richard said quietly. "Medical supplies for the campus clinic. Food for the cafeteria. If there’s anything left in the whole district, it’ll be in there."
Grey lowered his hand to his dagger and felt it flicker into being in his palm.
Beside him, Bolt’s ears came forward. The hound did not growl. He only stood very still, nose trembling, staring at the darkness beneath the shutters.
"Ready?" Richard whispered.
Grey tightened his grip.
"Ready."