Chapter 303: Hungry People.
The road was empty and we walked down the middle of it, my eyes moving constantly, the bag in my right hand and Venna on my left. The street lights burned in long, isolated pools of yellow. Between them the dark sat thick and complete.
"What’s your best memory from the plain?" she asked. Her voice was low, almost careful, the way people speak when the dark itself feels like it might be listening.
"I once watched two zombies having sex."
She laughed out loud before she could stop herself, then clapped a hand over her own mouth and looked around the empty street. The sound of the laugh bounced once off the shopfronts and died.
"Seriously?"
"It’s the story I always lead with." I glanced sideways at her for a fraction of a second—blue hair catching the nearest street light in a soft, unnatural halo—and went back to the road. "That line has worked on three girls so far."
"It’s original. I’ll give you that."
We’d agreed to keep our eyes forward and our senses wide open, and she was breaking the rule every few seconds to look at me. It didn’t matter. My hearing was doing more work than both sets of eyes combined, running out ahead of us down every alley we passed—cataloguing the small sounds, the absences, the places where the quiet was too complete.
"Do you want the memory I actually can’t get rid of?"
"Only if you want to give it to me."
"It’s my mother." I let it come out at the pace it wanted to. The words left my mouth and sat in the cool air between us. "I watched her die. There were too many of them and they were all over her and I was ten years old and there was nothing in me that could have helped."
"Bram." Her voice dropped. The single syllable carried more weight than the name usually did. "You don’t have to."
"I’m good." And I found that I was. The telling of it sat differently now than it had on the counter two nights ago. "I ran. I got a long way and then I stopped, because I thought maybe she’d made it. Maybe she’d got up. So I went back."
Venna didn’t say anything. The silence she gave me was clean and complete.
"I got within sight of the building and I stopped. Because if she had turned, I’d have seen it. And then that would have been the last picture I had of her, forever, instead of the one I already had." I watched the dark shopfronts slide past us—glass reflecting the street lights in long, empty sheets, doorways that held nothing but deeper black. "So I turned around and ran again. I chose the smile. I’ve carried her smiling somewhere in me ever since, and I’ve never once been sure if that was strength or cowardice."
"That’s beautiful," Venna said. "And it was neither. It was a ten year old protecting the only thing he had left."
We reached a junction and I stopped us.
The street running left had no lights at all. Not one. A black corridor between two rows of buildings with no way to see what was standing in it. The darkness there was absolute, the kind that swallowed the edges of the buildings themselves. The air coming out of it felt cooler.
"Not that way."
"Why?"
"Because darkness belongs to them. They don’t need eyes. All they need is one sound and the smell of blood, and we’d be giving them both."
We took the lit road instead. The yellow pools of light stretched ahead in a broken line. Our footsteps sounded too loud against the asphalt.
"Do you actually know where Max lives?" Venna asked, which was the right question and one I’d been avoiding.
"No."
"Bram."
"But he isn’t far from my building. I know that much." I stepped over something in the road without looking down at it—cloth, or a bag, or something that had been a person earlier in the day. "Becky was in and out of his place constantly and never took transport. Sherry mentioned walking there. It’s in my district."
On the left side of the road, a girl was throwing herself at a door.
Small, maybe fifteen, both hands flat and hammering, then her shoulder, then her hands again, over and over against a door that wasn’t going to open. The sound of it was steady and hopeless—flesh and bone against wood that didn’t care.
She never once turned around. We were fifteen metres from her and she had no idea we existed. Her shadow jumped and shortened under the nearest street light with every impact.
Somebody inside that house was holding that door shut and listening to it.
We kept walking. The hammering continued behind us, receding, becoming part of the general quiet of the street.
"So how do we find him with no address?"
"We’ll find him." My eyes kept moving—shopfronts, alley mouths, the places where the light failed. "I’ve found harder things with less."
And then I caught it.
Behind us. Movement that wasn’t the girl at the door. Coordinated, several sets of feet, keeping to the walls. Soft. Careful. The particular sound of people who had decided the dark was safer than the open road and were wrong about it.
"Stop." I said it barely above a breath.
Venna stopped instantly. The bag settled against my leg. For a moment the whole street was silent except the girl’s hands on that door, over and over, behind us in the dark—a steady, distant percussion that suddenly felt like the only ordinary sound left in the capital.
I pushed my hearing out and found them. Bodies against brick. Cloth. Somebody’s breathing, held too carefully. The small metallic shift of something that might have been a weapon adjusting in a grip.
"They’ve got a bag." A whisper, two buildings back. The voice was low and raw.
"A bag doesn’t mean food."
"It means something."
"Are you going to kill them?"
"Obviously. Before somebody else does it and takes what’s in it."
I turned my head, trying to place them exactly. Two buildings, three, an alley mouth. They were spread out and moving and I couldn’t fix a direction. The whispers moved with them, fragmented, hunting.
"Run," I said.
We went.
Because I’d learned the arithmetic of this out on the plain years ago, and the arithmetic never changes. Hungry people are more dangerous than the infected. An infected only wants to eat you. A frightened man with nothing left will kill you for what he thinks might be in your bag, and then find out afterward. The difference is the planning. The difference is the eyes.
We hit the corner at full speed and came round it into a wall of men.
Six of them, maybe seven, and every weapon in the group came up at once. Rifles. A length of pipe. Something that might once have been a kitchen knife. The street light above us laid hard yellow across their faces and left their eyes in shadow. The air between us went still.
I stopped so hard Venna went past me half a step before I caught her arm. The bag swung forward with the sudden halt and settled again against my side.
"One more step." The man at the front had both hands on his rifle and neither of them was steady. The barrel trembled in small, continuous movements. His knuckles were white. "You take one more step and I put you down."
Neither of us moved.
These weren’t the ones from the alley. That was the first thing my eyes told me and the second thing my ears confirmed. The voices behind us were still back there—farther now, but still moving. Two groups. Separate. Both of them looking at the same bag.
We’d run from one and straight into another, and the second one was better armed and considerably more frightened. The man’s eyes had gone to the bag in my right hand and stayed there. He hadn’t looked at my face once. The rifle barrel tracked the weight of the essentials Venna had packed as if the bag itself were the only living thing on the street.
Behind us, back down the road, the girl kept hammering on that door. The sound arrived thin and continuous, a small desperate rhythm against wood, while six or seven weapons held steady on the two of us under a single street light in a capital that had stopped being a city and become something else entirely.