Chapter 310: The Walls Are Ours.
The bearded man walked out with the tattooed boy and left the four of us sitting in that office with our hands free. The rope marks on my wrists were pale and raw.
The cobwebs in the corners hung motionless in the yellow light. The thin table sat between us like something that had already decided it was finished with the conversation.
"We need to get out of this stupid building." Linn said it while their footsteps were still audible in the corridor—soft, receding, completely unhurried.
I didn’t offer anything, because the untying was the first thing that had told me something real about this place. Nobody leaves four strangers loose in a room unless the room isn’t the thing holding them. The door stood open. The corridor beyond it was empty.
"She’s right." Trapper turned to me, and it was me he wanted, not the others. His eyes were still swollen from the stake, the blood had dried dark along the side of his mouth. "You. The four of us can plan something. Right now, before they come back."
"Let’s study the place first." Venna said it evenly. Her hands were folded in her lap. "See how it works. Where the doors are, how many of them there are."
"She’s right." I had no option but to back her, and she’d said the smarter thing anyway. The words left my mouth quiet and final.
"Guys, use your fucking brains." Linn was on her feet. The chair scraped hard against the concrete. "The zombies are coming here. This place has no doors. None. If we sit and study it we’ll all be zombies by morning."
"As much as I hate this bitch," Trapper jabbed a thumb at her, "she’s right."
"Don’t call me a bitch."
"Bitch."
"Guys—"
Trapper was up too now, and the two of them had squared off across the table in about four seconds, which told me they’d known each other long before tonight. The streets had history in them and we’d walked into the middle of somebody’s.
A bell rang twice.
The noise from the factory floor died. All of it. Hundreds of people, gone silent between one breath and the next. The sudden absence of sound was denser than the roar had been. It pressed against the open doorway and filled the small office completely.
That shut both of them up faster than I could have. Linn’s mouth stayed open for half a second and then closed. Trapper’s shoulders dropped a fraction.
"You want me to kill their leaders?" Trapper sat back down. The chair accepted his weight with a soft complaint. "I’ll strangle every one of them. Give me a room and ten minutes."
"We study the camp first." I kept my voice right down, because the whole building had gone quiet enough to carry.
Footsteps in the corridor. Soft. Measured.
The bearded man appeared in the doorway. The yellow light from the office laid him in uneven colour. The grey in his beard caught it and held.
"Follow me."
He turned and walked toward the big room without waiting to see whether we would. The decision had already been made for us.
We went after him. Trapper and Linn ahead, already muttering to each other about something, their war forgotten the moment there was an outside to it—the soft, continuous friction of two people who had been arguing longer than they’d been allies.
Venna and me behind. Her shoulder found mine and stayed close enough that I could feel the heat of her through the fabric.
Hundreds of people stood on that factory floor, every one of them facing front, every one of them silent. The working lights threw hard white pools across the concrete and left the upper reaches of the space in shadow.
The scale of the silence was worse than the scale of the noise had been. Bodies packed in loose ranks, all of them turned the same direction, all of them waiting.
The bearded man walked out into the middle of the open space and we stopped behind him. The concrete under our boots was scarred and uneven. Dust rose in small, slow clouds around our feet and settled again.
He didn’t speak straight away. He stood there and looked at them, breathing it in, letting it stretch out. A performer.
The silence held. Somewhere in the crowd a single cough was cut short.
My eyes went across the crowd hunting for Mercury.
She’d seen me. I knew she’d seen me.
I found her.
Her eyes were already on mine, and she gave me a smile and a middle finger raised right there in front of her chest, entirely unbothered by whoever else might catch it before I did. The gesture was small, precise, and completely without shame.
"THESE WALLS ARE OURS." The bearded man’s voice filled the whole building. The words bounced off the high ceiling and came back denser.
"THE WALLS ARE OURS TO TAKE AGAIN."
Hundreds of throats, in perfect time, like they’d been saying it for years. The sound was a single continuous wave that started at the front and rolled back through the ranks without a single voice lagging. The concrete under my feet seemed to take the vibration of it and hold it.
What the fuck. It’s been hours. Hours. These people sound like they’ve been an army since birth.
Venna’s thought landed in my head and it was the exact thing I’d been holding. The channel between us stayed open for a second longer than the thought itself, carrying the shared disbelief across the small space between our shoulders.
"NO MORE HIDING." He let it hang. The silence that followed was deliberate, measured, the pause of a man who knew exactly how long the room would wait for him.
"HIDING IS FOR THE WEAK."
"WHO WANTS TO TAKE BACK THE CITY?"
The room went up.
The roar was immediate and absolute—hundreds of voices opening at once, the sound filling every corner of the factory floor and climbing the walls.
And through the middle of that roar Mercury was making gestures at me, obscene ones, mouthing words across a hundred feet of factory floor with the specific intention of making me break in front of the entire camp. Her hands moved. Her mouth shaped something I was glad I couldn’t fully read. The grin never left.
I moved my eyes over the tops of their heads and gave her nothing. The refusal was the only answer that wouldn’t cost me the room.
So this is what we’ve been hearing all evening. From two districts away. This.
"Calm yourselves, soldiers." The bearded man raised a hand and every voice cut. The silence returned as completely as it had left—one breath, and the roar was gone. "Tonight we welcome new members."
"GIVE THEM A HUNTING HOUR."
"GIVE THEM A HUNTING HOUR."
"GIVE THEM A HUNTING HOUR."
Three times, in rhythm, hundreds of people calling for four strangers to be sent out into a city full of infected with something strapped to their ankles. The words landed in perfect unison, the same wave starting at the front and rolling back without a single voice out of place. The demand was clean and absolute and completely without mercy.
"I’m sorry." He waited for it to settle. The hand stayed raised a fraction longer than it needed to. "We’ve had our last hour."
They booed.
And Mercury was booing along with them, both hands cupped around her mouth, her eyes locked on mine the whole time, throwing her weight behind a room full of people who wanted us out on those streets tonight. The sound of it was almost affectionate in its aggression. She put her whole body into it.
I almost lost it. Genuinely, standing there, I almost went—the laugh rising hard and sudden behind my teeth before I locked it down and swallowed it. The effort of keeping my face still cost more than the charge had cost me in the yard.
"Soldiers." The bearded man opened both arms. The gesture was wide, theatrical, the final movement of a man who had been building toward this exact second since the sun went down. "Allow me to welcome Professor Robert Bagins."
The factory erupted.
"BAGINS."
"BAGINS."
"BAGINS."
And somewhere in the middle of that noise, I realized something.
They weren’t afraid of him.
They believed in him.