Chapter 311: The Professor’s Army.
Bagins came through the same door we had used, both arms already open, walking into the noise like a man stepping into warm water. The hard white lights from the high ceiling caught the edges of him and threw his shadow long across the concrete. The roar of the crowd folded around him and held.
He was so locked onto the crowd in front of him that he never once turned his head toward the four of us standing behind his own second. The bearded man’s shoulders blocked part of the view. Bagins’ face was lit from above, the expression already open, already performing.
"BAGINS."
"BAGINS."
The bearded man walked himself backwards in slow deliberate steps, opening the floor for his leader, and there was something practised in the way he did it—the measured retreat of a man who had rehearsed the distance. They had done this before. Tonight was not the first performance.
Bagins raised both hands and lowered them.
Hundreds of voices stopped at once. The silence was absolute, the kind that presses against the ears after too much sound. Somewhere in the upper reaches of the factory a loose panel settled with a soft metallic complaint.
"WHO IS READY FOR THE BAPTISM?"
Their answer came back at a volume that told me exactly how much of this room wanted the four of us in whatever was about to happen. The roar climbed the walls and came back denser. The air itself seemed to vibrate with it.
Five men peeled out of the crowd and went at a run toward the far wall. My eyes tracked them the whole way. They crouched over something down there and started organising it between them, working quickly, like men who had done that before too.
"I’m excited as well," Bagins said. The smile on him was wide and completely without doubt.
These people have not been together for one full day.
And they are better organised than CGI managed in a decade. That man owns this room. Sinn has the chair, the army, the broadcast system and the entire government behind him, and he does not own one corridor of his own building the way this failed professor owns this floor.
I lost a few seconds of his speech inside that. The words kept coming—cadence rising, arms moving—but the shape of the room had already told me more than the speech would.
"They told us to stay in our houses." He was building now, walking as he spoke. The hard light moved across his face with every step. "To keep our mouths shut. To put our hands on the window bars and our eyes on the street, and watch the infected walk around out there enjoying our city."
His voice climbed. The crowd leaned in without moving their feet.
"They instructed us to whisper. They said that speaking would bring the infected to us."
He let one second of silence sit. The silence was deliberate, measured, the pause of a man who knew exactly how long the room would wait for him.
"So what are we doing right now?"
"SHOUTING."
"AND WHERE ARE THE FUCKING INFECTED?" He turned a slow circle with his arms wide open. The gesture took in the whole factory floor—the ranks of bodies, the scarred concrete, the dead windows three floors up. "Where are they? Look around this room. Every one of you. Where are they?"
The roar came up and filled the whole building and shook something loose in the roof. Dust sifted down through the hard white light in slow, shining curtains. The sound was a single continuous wave that started at the front and rolled back without a single voice lagging.
I stood in the middle of it with cold going down my back, because it was a stupid question with a real answer and nobody in that room wanted the real answer.
They aren’t here because something is holding them somewhere else.
King’s words came back to me. An army against the zombies. The arithmetic of it sat cold and clean behind my eyes and refused to leave.
"Let me help you." Bagins waited the noise out, enjoying every second of it. The smile never left. "They are afraid. That is where they are. They are afraid because we grow with every hour that passes. They are afraid because we have new members. Even tonight. Even now."
He turned around.
That was the entire purpose of the introduction, and I had known it was coming for a full minute. The hard light caught the side of his face as he completed the turn.
The four of us stood in a loose line behind the bearded man—Trapper, Venna, me, Linn—hands free, rope marks still pale on our wrists, the whole of the camp’s attention about to land on us.
His eyes came across the four of us, moved, and settled on nobody.
He hasn’t seen me.
I was certain. If Bagins had found my face standing in his own camp he would have stopped dead. He would have stammered, or laughed, or pointed at me and told the whole room a story. Whatever else that man was, he was not capable of seeing me and saying nothing. The eyes passed over the space where I stood and kept going, already turning back toward the crowd that belonged to him.
He turned back to his people. The hard light settled across his shoulders again.
Bram. Venna’s thought hit me hard enough to turn my head. The channel between us opened clean and sharp. Look.
Left.
Trapper’s hand was already out.
The mesh was already forming in the air in front of it—dark, weighted, the same coarse weave that had taken us on the street—already travelling, already past the point where anything I did would matter. The edges of it caught the hard white light and threw thin, intersecting shadows across the concrete as it moved.
Don’t—
Too fast. Far too fast.
Attacking Bagins inside a room with hundreds of people in it, most of them ability users, in a building with one door and no windows on the ground floor, was the single stupidest thing anyone had thought of tonight. And tonight had produced genuine competition. The thought arrived complete and useless in the same second the nets closed.
The net closed on the bearded man’s throat and on Bagins’ throat at the same moment and both of them went straight down. The sound of two bodies hitting concrete was short and final.
Then everything slowed the way it always does.
Five men carrying the basin froze mid-stride, water still pouring over the rim. Their faces shifted—confusion to recognition to the blank readiness of weapons about to fire.
Hundreds of heads turned in a single rolling wave. Eyes found the two men on the floor. Then found us.
A man near the middle of the room brought a bazooka up onto his shoulder with the careful weight of someone who had been waiting for permission. The dark mouth of the tube settled on the centre of my chest and held.
Mercury was already moving.
She had crossed half the distance before my eyes even found her—low, fast, shoulder dropped, taking the angle from the side while he was still settling the weapon.
She saw it before I did.
Trapper’s left hand came up. A second net left it in a dark weighted arc, spinning clean toward the tattooed boy at the front.
Venna dropped—deliberate, the same low practical motion she had used on the street when the first net took her.
Linn already moving, low and fast toward the door she’d chosen an hour.
Bagins and the bearded man clawed at their own necks on the concrete, faces changing colour.
The roar of the room rose again—hundreds of throats remembering at the same moment that they were full of weapons.
"What the fuck."
The words left my mouth and vanished into the sound.