The warehouse door was not locked.
Grey noticed that before anything else. It stood at the side of the building, a narrow steel personnel door tucked beside the sealed loading bay, and it hung a finger’s width ajar, as if someone had stepped through it moments ago and forgotten to pull it shut. The rain ran down its face in thin, silver threads. A yellow strip of light glowed along the gap.
Light.
He and Richard looked at each other.
"That’s not... " Richard whispered.
"No."
"Is that electricity?"
"I don’t know."
Bolt pressed close to Grey’s leg, nose lifted, sniffing hard at the gap. He didn’t growl. His tail didn’t wag either. It hung low and still, the way it did when he didn’t know what to make of a thing.
Grey put his palm against the door and pushed.
It swung inward without a sound.
Warmth hit his face first. Dry, still, almost gentle warmth, heavy with the smell of cardboard and plastic wrap and something faintly sweet underneath. A low, steady hum pulsed through the air, the kind of hum he had not heard in what felt like a lifetime and only now realised he had been missing. Fluorescent tubes buzzed along the ceiling, their light flat and white and cruelly bright after the darkness outside. Beyond them, stretching farther than the light could reach, rose the shelves.
Grey stopped in the doorway.
He had expected a warehouse. A few rows of crates, maybe. A cage of half-looted supplies and a dead cold room. He had prepared himself for scraps.
He had not prepared himself for this.
The shelves towered three storeys high, steel frames bolted to the floor, running away from him in long, orderly rows until they vanished in the distance. Every one of them was full. Sacks of rice stacked head-high. Cartons of canned beans, tomatoes, tuna, corn. Pallets of bottled water shrink-wrapped in plastic, forty bottles to a layer, twelve layers deep. Crates of cooking oil. Sugar. Flour. Salt. Whole aisles of biscuits and noodles and cereal and long-life milk. A refrigerated cabinet on the far wall glowed blue and hummed like a beehive, and inside it he could see stacked cartons of eggs, and cheese, and butter.
"Grey," Richard said, hoarsely, and his voice cracked in the middle of the name. "Grey, look."
Down the nearest row, a green cross was painted on the wall. Beneath it hung a row of steel racks, and on the racks, in neat labelled boxes, lay everything the gym had been begging for. Antibiotics. Fever tablets. Saline drips. Rolls of bandage. Syringes in sealed packs. A cold cabinet marked in red letters that Grey couldn’t read from here.
Richard let out a long, shaky breath, half a laugh, half a sob.
"If we’d only ended up here," he said, "instead of the gym..."
"We’d have starved to death by ourselves," Grey said, "sitting on a mountain of food, arguing about who got the bigger bed."
Richard barked a laugh. It bounced off the high ceiling and came back at them, too loud, and both of them flinched. He clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide, and Grey nearly smiled.
"Sorry," Richard whispered.
"Don’t be. Let’s move."
They didn’t run. Grey wanted to, badly. He wanted to grab everything he could carry and bolt for the door. But he made himself walk, slow and careful, dagger at his side, eyes moving from shelf to shelf. Every aisle they passed, he looked down. Every corner, he checked. The floor was clean. There were no bodies, no blood, no scratches on the concrete. The lights hummed. The freezers hummed. Nothing else moved.
’Too clean.’
He filed the thought away and kept walking.
The first thing they did was eat.
They had not admitted how hungry they were until the smell of bread reached them. It came from a wire trolley near the loading dock, stacked with plastic-wrapped loaves, still soft when Richard pressed his thumb into one. Neither of them said anything. Richard tore a bag open and handed Grey half a loaf, then found a jar of strawberry jam on the shelf beside it and cracked the lid with his teeth.
Grey had eaten bad food for two days. Peanut butter off a knife. Something crushed at the bottom of a bag. He tore the bread with his fingers, dragged it through the jam, and put it in his mouth, and for a moment his whole body went still.
It was so sweet.
It was the most ordinary thing in the world, a slice of bread with jam, and it nearly made his eyes sting. He swallowed. Took another bite. Beside him Richard ate with his eyes closed, chewing slowly, tears running down his nose without any sound at all.
Neither of them mentioned it.
Bolt’s tail thumped against a pallet.
Grey glanced down. The hound was looking at him, then at the bread, then back at him, with the slow, patient, hopeful stare that no amount of hardening had ever taught him to resist. Grey sighed.
"You can’t have jam."
Bolt whined.
"It’ll make you sick. Come on."
He led him down the next aisle, past rows of cat litter and rawhide chews and cheap plastic squeaky toys, until they reached a shelf stacked with dry dog food. Big sacks, twenty kilos each, printed with a cartoon Labrador. Grey slit one open with his dagger and poured a handful onto the concrete.
"Try it."
Bolt sniffed it. Sniffed it again. Looked up at Grey as if for permission.
"Go on."
A moment’s hesitation, and then the hound lowered his head and took a piece between his teeth. He crunched. His ears flicked.
He ate the whole pile. Then he looked up, licked his nose, and nudged Grey’s hand for more.
Grey let out a breath that felt like a laugh. "Fine. Fine, you glutton."
He poured another handful. And another. And crouched there in the fluorescent light, scratching behind his dog’s ears, and let himself have exactly thirty seconds of a world that made sense.
Then he stood up, and got to work.
They filled the bags first. The backpacks Richard had brought and Grey’s nylon sack, stuffing them with canned food, rice, biscuits, dried noodles. They hunted through the janitorial aisle for more, and found a bundle of large white nylon sacks, the kind used for rice deliveries, tough and stitched at the seams. They filled those next. Grey moved through the medicine racks methodically, reading each label twice. Antibiotics went into the sack, along with three boxes of paracetamol, four bags of saline, bandages, syringes, antiseptic, a plastic tub of something labelled oral rehydration. Richard watched him with open awe.
"How do you know what any of that is?"
"I don’t." Grey tossed another box into the sack. "I know what the words say. If it says infection, I take it. If it says fever, I take it. We can sort it out later."
"That’s a terrible system."
"It’s the only one we have."
Richard laughed again, softer this time, and went to work on the water.
For a while it was almost peaceful. The hum of the lights. The rustle of plastic. Bolt trotting between aisles, sniffing, tail swinging. Grey caught himself, twice, humming under his breath, and stopped.
They had two sacks full and a third half-full, and Richard was struggling to lift the biggest of them onto his shoulder when Bolt stopped.
He stopped mid-stride, one paw raised, head turning toward the end of the aisle.
His hackles rose.
Grey stopped too. "Richard."
"Yeah, I’m coming, just let me..."
"Richard. Stop."
The big man froze with the sack half over his shoulder. He followed Grey’s gaze.
At the far end of the row, beyond the last shelf, where the fluorescent lights gave way to a wash of darker shadow, stood a man.
He was just standing there.
He was tall, thin, and pale, dressed in the grey overalls of a warehouse worker, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His arms hung limp at his sides. His head was tilted slightly to the left, the way a bird’s head tilts when it is listening. He was too far away for Grey to see his face clearly, but he could see the eyes, and they were fixed on the two of them, unblinking, unmoving.
Neither of them said anything.
The lights hummed.
"Hey," Richard called finally, and Grey wanted to tell him to be quiet. "Hey, man! It’s okay! We’re not... we’re not going to hurt you."
The man did not move.
Richard set the sack down slowly, both hands raised, palms open, the way you approach a frightened dog. "We’re friends. My name’s Richard. This is Grey. We’re from the university, we’ve got a group, people at the gym on campus. There’s, uh, quite a few of us. Some of us are sick. We came for the medicine." He took a slow step forward. "You’re welcome to come with us, if you want. There’s room. We could use someone who knows this place."
Silence.
Grey stared at the man’s chest.
It was not moving.
It took him three full seconds to realise what he was looking at. The man was standing in the light, in a room so quiet that Grey could hear his own pulse, and his chest was not rising. Not once. Not even the smallest tremor of breath.
’Something is not right.’
"Richard," he said quietly, "back up."
"What? He’s just scared..."
"Back. Up."
The man turned.
He did it slowly. Without a word, without a change in his expression, he turned his back on the two of them and walked toward the shelf at his side. One step, then two. His shoes made no sound on the concrete. He stopped in front of a vertical steel upright, four metres tall, bolted into the floor, holding up a whole tier of pallets.
He wrapped his hand around it and pulled.
The metal screamed. Bolts snapped. A cascade of dust and cardboard fell from the shelf above, and the whole frame shuddered. And with a sound like a bone being pulled from its socket, the man tore an iron rod, two metres long, thick as a wrist, free of the shelf.
He turned around, holding it in one hand like a walking stick.
His face was pale as candle wax, stretched tight over his cheekbones. His eyes had gone entirely black. His lips peeled back from teeth that were much too long, and from somewhere deep in his throat came a sound Grey had never heard from any zombie or mutant or monster: a low, wet, snarling growl that shook the air.
"Is that..." Richard breathed. "Is that a zombie?"
’No.’
It was too aware. Too deliberate. It had looked at them and made a choice. It was something else, something nearly human and nearly dead, standing in a warehouse full of light with a weapon in its hand, and it was smiling.
"Richard," Grey said.
The creature sprang.
It crossed forty metres of concrete in the space of a breath. Grey saw it lunge, saw the iron rod rise over its head, and then it was simply gone from where it had been and here, in front of them, its shadow spilling across his face. The rod came down in a blur that his eyes could not follow.
He barely got the dagger up.
Steel met steel with a crack like a thunderclap, and the force of it drove Grey to his knees.
’This,’ he thought, teeth clenched, arms trembling, ’is trouble.’