Chapter 402: Look at Who’s Standing Next to You.

We want a place with no outsiders. No strays. No infected. No citizens.

Just people. I told you yesterday morning that the infected are part of us now, and today you can see it for yourselves. Look around you. Look at who's standing next to you.

Max's voice filled the street — thin with distance, clear enough that the words sat in the air between the street lights.

Linn walked on the far edge of the road, tarmac under her shoes, as far from the sidewalk as the width allowed. Mercury kept close to the pavement. Venna took the middle. Between them and the buildings, every few metres, an infected stood in the wash of the lights — empty hands, wrong stillness, uniforms on some of them.

"Why are you two actually going to this execution?" Linn didn't slow.

"To witness the history Max keeps promising us," Mercury said.

"That's bullshit." Linn's boots found a crack in the asphalt and stepped over it. "I know you two are up to something and I've known since you asked me for that key."

Mercury's hand came out as she passed the next one. Fingers tapped the infected's shoulder and she kept walking without breaking stride. The infected's head stayed fixed on whatever it had been fixed on.

"Honestly?" Venna's voice sat low between them. "We think Bram might be one of the people Max wants to kill."

"Who's Bram?" Linn's mouth caught up with the name. "That dude we were with. Is he with Bagins?"

"Probably," Mercury said. "Chances are Bagins is right there next to him."

"Then I'm excited." Linn's voice hardened. Something in her shoulders went tight. "I'd genuinely pay to watch a guillotine take that motherfucker's head off. He tied bombs to our ankles. Bombs, on our legs, and sent us into the street."

Every one of you thought you'd lost somebody. You hadn't. They turned, and they're still here, and I give you my word that we are working every hour to give them their minds back.

"That's a lie," Mercury said. Out loud, to the road, to the speaker-voice hanging over it.

The infected were never the enemy of these walls. The families were. And in five minutes from now we finish with the families for good.

Linn stopped walking. Turned. Looked at Mercury full.

"Is your boyfriend part of a family?"

"He's not my boyfriend." Mercury's head turned to Venna. "Is he, brotherfucker?"

Venna's face gave nothing. She kept her eyes on the road ahead.

They came past the point where the cars had stopped — a line of abandoned vehicles, doors shut, windscreens dark — and joined the people flowing up the road. Groups of three and five. A woman with a child half-asleep on her shoulder. All of them going the same way, all of them leaning forward for a sightline that hadn't arrived yet.

And now it's time.

Max's voice climbed. The crowd noise thinned for the cue.

Bring them out.

The CGI building came up ahead — glass and concrete, the front doors lit, the platform raised against them. They pushed into the mass. Shoulders, backs, the heat of too many bodies in too little space. The mass thickened until it stopped letting them through. Nothing visible at the front but the backs of heads.

Mercury turned.

Behind them, a car sat empty. Every person around it faced forward, fighting for the same view, leaving the roof clear under the street light.

She took Venna's hand. Venna took Linn's. Mercury pulled them both back through the press — elbows, apologies that weren't, the give of the crowd as it closed behind them — until the car's sill was under her palms.

She gripped. Hauled herself up onto the roof. Metal flexed under her knees. She reached down for Venna.

Linn was already up, boots planted on the roof, scanning.

From the height they had the whole front of the building. Max on the platform, light on him, the doors behind him shut. The microphone in his hand. The crowd a dark moving field between the car and the stage.

"Where are they?" Venna's voice sat close. "He gave the order. Where are the people?"

"I don't know."

Mercury's eyes stayed on the front doors. Nothing came out of them. No line of prisoners. No escort. Only Max and the light and the waiting.

I'd rather not lose my patience out here. Max forced a small laugh into the microphone. The crowd laughed with him — a single thick sound that rolled up the face of the building and came back. Whoever is holding the traitors. Bring them out. Now.

Mercury and Venna kept their eyes on the doors.

Linn's went to the crowd.

"Zombies everywhere," she said. "Fucking zombies. Every ten feet."

"They're controlled." Mercury turned her head to look back the way they'd come.

And she locked onto three faces.

Sherry. Becky. May. Crossing the street at the back of the crowd — not moving toward the platform, not fighting for a sightline. Going somewhere else entirely, and going fast. May's stride a half-step ahead of the other two.

Sherry—

The sound came out of the building.

It hit the car roof first and went through the metal into their knees, their hands, their teeth. Mercury was flat on the roof with both palms clamped over her ears before the decision to drop had finished forming. The scream occupied the skull from the inside and pushed outward until the bone felt too small. Venna folded beside her. Linn went down on her other side.

Every person in that crowd did the same thing in the same second. Thousands of them, folding, hands to the sides of their heads, the mass of the square collapsing inward on itself like something cut at the base.

Every person except the infected.

And Max, standing on his platform, untouched, the microphone still in his hand, the light still on his face.

It lasted about a minute.

Then it stopped.

The silence that came in behind it was worse than the sound. Mercury's hands stayed where they were. The ringing in her ears held. She pushed herself up on her elbows and looked for Sherry.

The street behind them was empty. No Sherry. No Becky. No May. Only asphalt and the backs of people still on their knees.

The crowd started lifting their heads. Max's mouth was moving into the microphone. Not one word of it was getting through, only the shape of speech under the high continuous tone the scream had left behind.

Venna got up beside her, eyes already back on the front doors, waiting for the traitors to come out.

Linn came up last.

She was looking at an infected standing directly in front of the car.

It turned its head.

Slow. Its eyes found the man beside it — ordinary jacket, hands still halfway to his ears. It took him by the shoulder. Bit into his neck. It let him go. He folded. It turned to the next one.

"What the fuck." Linn's hand landed on Mercury's shoulder and gripped hard enough to hurt. "Mercury. Look."

All the way down the street they were moving.

Every one of them, at once, in a crowd of thousands who had come to watch somebody else die.