Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The rumble of trucks came in through the walls and filled the whole factory, and four hundred men shouted over the top of it.

Bagins stood at the front with Mercury beside him, handing that room the thing that had pulled every one of them out of a locked house and into a warehouse in the middle of an apocalypse.

I stood by the door of his office with Venna. At the front, but off to the side of it. Her shoulder touched mine. The blue of her hair caught the edge of the light and held it.

"I know all of you are ready to fight zombies." Bagins had his whole chest behind it. The voice that had filled this room twice already filled it again—larger this time, aimed at the backs of the ranks as much as the faces in front. "I know every one of you has been waiting for this specific hour. To walk out of here and take those streets back."

They roared at him. The sound started at the front and rolled back through the ranks without a single voice lagging. Boots struck concrete. Someone near the middle threw both arms up and the gesture spread.

"We are not going out there to fight zombies."

The noise cut off.

"We are going to move them out of our way. Because they are not the enemy. They never were." He let it hang. The hard light caught the grey at his temples and the tired skin under his eyes and left the rest of the expression in the particular focus of a man who had finally been given a direction large enough for the room. "We are going to the CGI headquarters."

The building came apart.

The roar that came back was different—sharper, less rhythmic, the sound of a crowd that had just been handed a target with walls and a name. Men turned toward each other. Someone near the back started a chant that didn’t fully form before the next wave of noise took it.

"He’s good," Venna said, watching him. Her voice stayed low enough that only I caught it. "He talks the way Uncle Eddie talks."

"He’s a leader." I hadn’t taken my eyes off him. "A real one."

"WHO IS READY?"

Mercury jumped up onto the raised floor beside him. The motion was pure Mercury—no hesitation, no check for permission, both boots finding the platform as if it had been waiting for her weight.

"Who’s ready to walk into that headquarters and take back what belongs to us? We want peaceful walls. That’s all any of us has ever wanted."

The answer came back in a single continuous wave. Venna’s fingers found the edge of my sleeve and stayed there.

"Do you regret it?" Venna asked. "That we’re siblings."

"No."

I turned to look at her properly. The hard light laid half her face in gold and left the rest in soft shadow. Hr blue eyes held steady on mine.

"It’s one of the only things that’s happened to me since I crossed the walls that changed me in a good direction. I feel attached to you. Genuinely attached."

"Likewise." She looked out at the crowd. "Can I be frank with you?"

Mercury stepped forward and Bagins gave her the floor. The gesture was small and absolute—a man who had spent the evening being the only voice in the room recognising another one that could carry it.

"Please." I said.

"What we had inside Abuela’s house is going to be the best moment of my life." She watched Mercury working the room, then turned back to me. The words arrived quiet and complete. "I don’t think you enjoyed it as much as I did. Did you?"

"Every detail," I said. "All of it."

The counter. The dark room. The morning after. The fridge behind the glass. The weight of her against me while the capital ended outside the locked door. None of it required embellishment. The truth of it sat between us cleaner than anything the warehouse was shouting about.

"If any of this ever settles," she said, "I’m going to rebuild that house. Exactly as it was. And I’m going to live in it for the rest of my life."

"That’s good."

She put her hand into mine. The contact was warm and deliberate. Her fingers closed. Behind the hard white lights the crowd continued its noise, and for a few seconds the two of us stood inside it without belonging to it.

"WHO WANTS TO BREAK THE SKULL OF A FUCKING ZOMBIE?"

Mercury got exactly the answer she was after. The roar that came back shook something loose in the upper reaches of the factory. Dust sifted down through the hard light in slow shining curtains.

Outside, engines were turning over and men were shouting instructions at each other in the dark.

"Let me tell you something about myself that nobody in this room knows."

The floor went quiet for her. The authority of the silence was immediate—hundreds of throats closing because the woman on the raised platform had decided the next sentence required it.

"I was born to a man who wasn’t man enough to be one, and a woman who was strong enough to be a great deal more than a woman."

I watched her and tried to work out where she was going. She paused, letting the laughter die.

"I think she’s a good person," Venna said.

"The best. Everybody should have a Mercury somewhere in their life."

"If my father were standing here with us tonight," Mercury continued, "he’d be locked in the most secure room in this building with his balls on the cold floor, shaking. And I’ll tell you something else. He died with every bit of that fear still in him. He never put a single piece of it down."

The laugh that went through the ranks was sharp and grateful—the sound of a crowd being given permission to hate something smaller than the night outside. Bagins caught my eye across the front of the room and lifted his chin. You’re next.

I shook my head once. The refusal was clean. Whatever Mercury was building, it did not need my voice on top of it. Venna’s hand stayed in mine.

"WHO IS AFRAID OF THE ZOMBIES?" Mercury shouted.

"YOUR FUCKING FATHER."

"YES." She threw both arms up. "My father and his cold balls. Now let’s get out here and sweep every last one of them off our streets."

Bagins stepped forward beside her. The two of them held the raised floor together for a second and then he opened his arms the way he had when he first introduced himself to this room.

"LET’S GO."

The whole warehouse moved at once, four hundred people turning for the doors and the trucks and the road. The sound of it was enormous—boots, voices, the continuous scrape of bodies finding the exits. Dust rose. The scarred concrete disappeared under the flood of them.

And one thing sat completely clear in my head while I watched them go.

None of them have ever fought one. Not one of these men has stood in front of a single infected in his life. They think this is a march.

There’s a real war a few miles up that road and it hasn’t started yet.

Venna’s fingers tightened in mine.