Chapter 49: Forty-Ninth
Chapter 49: Forty-Ninth
Five kilometres is nothing. Five kilometres is an hour’s walk.
Five kilometres is also very different when you spent the previous night having wire drawn through your arm, and I was in trouble inside the first twenty minutes.
Feline Grace kept me upright over the rubble and it kept my feet where I put them, and it did absolutely nothing about the fact that my legs had been emptied out the night before and had not been refilled. I ran until I couldn’t, walked until I could run again, and repeated that until the numbers in the corner of my eye stopped being abstract.
[Entrants: 12 / 50]
[Entrants: 19 / 50]
That was at the two-kilometre mark, and it changed how I was thinking about the whole thing, because at that rate the fifty would be gone before I arrived.
People were closer. Of course people were closer. Five kilometres is far for me and nothing for a car.
I stopped trying to be fast and started trying to be smart, which is the only competition I’ve ever won.
By the time I came up the embankment above the site, the count was at thirty-one and I could see the shape of the problem laid out below me like a diagram.
The shelter was a structure that did not belong — a low windowless dome of pale material sitting in the middle of a wrecked retail park, with a single dark opening on the eastern face. No door. Just an arch, and a threshold, and everything that mattered was on the far side of it.
The retail park was a bowl of collapsed roofs and flooded car park, and there was one clean approach: a raised service road that ran straight from the north edge to within thirty metres of the entrance.
There were nine armed men on it.
They’d parked two vehicles across the neck of the road and put people behind them, and they had rifles, and they had it worked out. Everything else was a wading crawl through open water and broken glass under their sightlines. If you wanted to get in fast, you went past them, and you went past them at their invitation.
I got down behind a ventilation stack and watched for six minutes.
There were maybe thirty other people scattered through the wreckage on the near side, in ones and twos and one group of about eight, and none of them were doing anything, and all of them were talking.
I could hear a knot of them below me, three metres down and around the corner of the building.
"—not going to shoot. They’re not going to shoot, they want the slots, that’s all, so if enough of us just walk—"
"Walk. Right." A woman’s voice, flat with exhaustion. "You go first, then. I’ll be right behind you."
"That’s not— look. Look, I’m saying if there’s forty of us and nine of them—"
"There aren’t forty of us. There’s you, and me, and Dean, and that lot over there who’ve been staring at your bag since we got here." A pause. "Where’d you even get that bag?"
"What’s my bag got to do with anything?"
"Nothing." She didn’t sound like it was nothing. "Twenty-two minutes ago you said we should wait and see if it filled up. Now you want to charge a roadblock. I’d just like to know which one you actually think."
"The count’s at thirty-one, that’s what changed—"
"I can see the count."
Nobody moved. That was the thing that struck me. Thirty frightened people with a fixed number falling in front of their eyes, and every single one of them was waiting for somebody else to be first.
They’re not going to do it. Not until the number’s at forty-eight and then they’ll all do it at once and half of them will get shot.
I went to work.
The monster pack was a hundred and fifty metres north-west, in a drainage ditch behind the retail park, and I’d seen them on the way down — six or seven of the low grey things, lying up in the shade the way they do in daylight. They were not remotely interested in the shelter. Nothing that isn’t human is.
They were, however, interested in what was in my bag.
I’d carried the remains of the shopping bag since the courtyard trick, wrapped in a second bag and stinking, and I had never been more grateful for a decision.
The service road had been built over the old storm drainage. A concrete maintenance channel ran from the pack’s ditch, beneath the embankment, and ended behind a broken grate at the base of a retaining wall. The northern vehicle stood almost directly above it. From the roadblock, the vehicle and wall hid the outlet completely; all nine men were facing south-east, toward the civilians they were controlling.
That was the route.
I spent eleven minutes laying a heavy start at the lip of the ditch, then a broken trail down the drainage line. The channel narrowed beneath the road until my shoulders scraped both sides. Rotting water soaked my shirt. At the far end, I eased the broken grate outward, reached through the gap from the vehicle’s blind side, and jammed everything I had left into the northern wheel arch without ever lifting my head above the retaining wall.
Then I crawled back through the same channel. Getting in and out cost me most of what I had, but none of the nine men ever looked behind their own vehicle.
Then I lay behind the ventilation stack and waited, because the trail wasn’t the trigger. The trail was just an argument. It needed something to interrupt the argument.
[Entrants: 38 / 50]
I let it get to forty-one.
Then I put the rifle on the stack, took eleven seconds to hold the sights on the flooded car park a long way to the south of the roadblock — nowhere near anyone, nowhere near me — and fired one round into the water.
The sound was enormous. It rolled around that bowl and came back twice.
Nine men swung south. Every civilian in the wreckage flinched and went flat. And a hundred and fifty metres north-west, seven animals that had been lying up in the shade with a wet trail leading directly to them stood up, because a loud noise is a thing dying makes.
They came down the drainage line at speed, following the smell, and the smell ended in the wheel arch of a truck.
I did not watch what happened next. I’d worked out where they’d fall back to — the road narrows behind the vehicles and the only cover is a loading bay on the east side — and I’d worked out that the moment the shooting turned north, the whole bowl of civilians would come up out of the water at once.
Both of those things happened. The rest of it was noise.
I was already moving, low, along the flooded southern edge, through eighty metres of water that came up over my knees and glass that went through my left boot somewhere around the halfway point. Feline Grace found me footing on submerged rubble I could not see. Twice my leading foot went into a hole and twice my weight came off it before I went down, and I would have gone down without her, and I would have stayed down.
Ahead of me, people were sprinting the last thirty metres in a ragged crowd. Somebody fell. Somebody stopped to pull them up, which surprised me, and somebody else went past both of them.
[Entrants: 46 / 50]
[Entrants: 47 / 50]
I came out of the water onto the apron with my chest burning and grey creeping in at the edges, and there was a man ahead of me and a woman ahead of him and the arch was twelve metres away, then eight, then four.
[Entrants: 48 / 50]
I crossed.
The air changed — a clean dry pressure, like stepping indoors out of wind.
[Temporary Shelter entry confirmed.]
[Entrant: 49 / 50]
I went about four steps further and stopped and put my hands on my knees, and behind me, out on the apron, thirty people worked out simultaneously that there was exactly one place left.
The sound they made was not like anything I have heard before.
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