Chapter 321: Who Is She?

"Is she certain?"

The words left my mouth and sat in the dark between us.

The most useless question available and I asked it anyway.

"She’s certain, Bram." Mercury’s whisper came back down the alley, low and absolute. "Zombies are zombies. You don’t misidentify them."

"What are they doing?"

That was the question that mattered. Standing, moving, feeding, hunting. Each of those is a different night, and the difference decides whether you walk out of an alley or get folded into it.

"I don’t know," Linn said.

And that was the whole problem with a corridor this narrow. Whoever is at the front is everyone’s eyes, and ours had stopped looking.

"Peep round and tell me."

"I can’t." Flat. Final. The voice of someone who had already measured the cost and refused it. "I just can’t do it."

"So what do we do?" Mercury asked.

"We go back." Linn was trying to turn. The motion was small and absolute in the confined space. "We take the long route. That’s what we do."

"How long have we got?"

"Twenty minutes," Mercury said. No one needed it explained.

"Then we can’t go back. Twenty minutes doesn’t cover a twenty minute detour." I looked ahead into the dark past Linn’s shoulder. The alley narrowed further toward the mouth. "Trapper. Get past her and tell me what they’re doing."

"Fuck you, dude." No hesitation at all. "You want to know, you come and look. I’d rather lose a leg than end up walking around out there."

"Fine." I said. "I’ll come and see."

"Why are you forcing this?" Linn’s voice climbed and bounced once off the close walls. "We have a safe option and you’re—"

"I’m coming through."

Mercury turned side-on and pressed her backside to the brick, facing the opposite wall, opening about eight inches of alley. The gap was nothing.

I went into it. The heat of her body filled it completely.

My chest came flat against hers and stopped there. The contact was total—fabric, breath, the hard line of the wall behind her and the harder fact of no space left to negotiate.

For a second neither of us moved. The alley held us both in the same narrow vertical slice of dark.

"Why aren’t you moving?"

"I’m working on it."

"Work faster."

I got through, both of us breathing harder than the effort deserved.

Trapper was narrower and took half the time; he slid past with a single exhaled complaint and then he was behind me.

Then it was Linn, and the alley was tighter at this end than anywhere behind us. The walls closed in until the gap she left was barely the width of a turned body.

She pressed herself to the wall and left me almost nothing—the line of her spine, the heat of her, the particular stubborn stillness of someone who had decided this was already more contact than the night required.

"If we’d just moved when I said, we’d be at King’s already." She said it into my ear as I squeezed against her. The words were hot and close and completely without volume. "You were on the phone with your girlfriend. Who cares about a girlfriend in an apocalypse?"

"Shut up."

"Seems to me you just enjoy touching my tits."

I hadn’t even registered where my hands were. They had found the only surfaces available—brick on one side, the curve of her under my palm on the other—and stayed there because the alternative was falling into her completely.

I moved them. The brick was rough and immediate under my fingers.

"Ew. Now you’re going lower."

"That’s the wall."

"What are you, some kind of apocalypse pervert?"

I got past her and reached the mouth of the alley. The white spill from the street light hit my face like a physical thing after the dark.

I put my head out.

Left was clear. All the way down, empty road under working lights. Asphalt, shutters, the ordinary geometry of a street that had not yet been claimed by anything. The light pools stretched away in a broken line and ended in nothing hostile I could see.

Right was not.

A building at the far end of the street with infected packed around it on every side, filling the road, spilling into the doorways of the buildings opposite. Bodies shoulder to shoulder, some still in scraps of uniform, some bare, all of them standing with the particular wrong stillness of the infected when nothing has given them a better idea.

Not one of them was moving.

They stood in the road facing the same building the way that crowd in the factory had faced Bagins. The same orientation. The same held attention.

"What is it, Bram?" Mercury from the dark behind me. The whisper travelled the length of the alley and arrived thin.

"Still working it out."

"Please. Seventeen minutes."

My eyes climbed the building.

There was an external stairway running up the outside of it—metal, utilitarian, the kind that had been bolted on for fire access and never meant for this—and somebody was walking up it.

A girl. Bald head catching the street light in a clean pale curve. Not infected. Nothing about her moved like them.

She wasn’t checking behind her. Wasn’t afraid in any way I could read at that distance. Her hands hung loose at her sides.

Ten of them were following her up the steps, staggering after her in single file, and she never once turned around to look.

The line of them swayed and corrected and kept climbing. The ones still on the road watched the ascent with the same empty focus they had given the building itself.

What am I looking at.

Who is she.

And why is she walking in front of them like they belong to her?

Nothing I knew about the infected explained it. Nothing on the plain, nothing in the Fallen City, nothing in twenty years of watching them stagger toward the last sound they heard.

These ones were not staggering toward a sound.

They aren’t wandering. They haven’t been wandering all night.

That’s why nothing came for the factory.

The realisation arrived complete and cold. Four hundred men chanting in an open building and not a single infected at the door.

A capital full of noise and blood and open streets, and the mass of them standing here facing a building as if it had given them an order.

"Left or right?" I asked.

"Left," Linn said from the dark behind me. No hesitation.

"Left is clear." I pulled my head back in. The dark of the alley closed over my face again. The heat of the close walls returned. "Let’s go."