Chapter 304: Essentials.
"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 under the hard yellow of the street light. "You take one more step and I put you down."
Every one of them was masked. Cloth over the lower half of the face, tied at the back, all seven of them the same, as though the infection were something you could breathe in and a strip of fabric would decide it. The cloth was dark, sweat-stained, the knots uneven. Their eyes above the masks were wide and tired and locked on the bag.
I stood still and took Venna’s hand, the bag hanging from my other one. Her fingers closed around mine, warm and tight. The street light laid our shadows long and thin across the asphalt between us and the guns.
None of you understand a single thing about surviving.
"Those two are zombies." A girl’s voice from the back of the group. Young. Sharp. The rifle in her hands came up a fraction higher.
"They’re not." The heavy one at the front said it with certainty. The mask muffled the words but not the authority underneath them.
"How can you tell?" Her rifle came up higher still. The barrel tracked the space between Venna and me. "Look at them. Standing there in the middle of the road at night. Let me put them down before they get their teeth in someone."
"We’re at a point where nobody else has to die."
"How can you tell?" She was shouting now. The sound bounced off the shopfronts and came back thinner. "There’s two of them and seven of us. Let me shoot them and we take the bag and we’re gone."
"Shut your mouth, Linn."
The heavy one pulled his mask down. Bald head, long beard going grey at the edges, a face that had been giving orders for longer than this week. Sweat shone across his scalp under the street light. The cloth mask hung around his neck like something discarded.
He turned back to us.
I was already working through it. Seven of them. Six weapons up, one hanging loose on a strap because its owner had lost interest and was watching the dark alley mouths instead. Distances. Angles. Which one fired first if it went wrong, and it was going to be the girl—the tension in her shoulders, the way the barrel kept climbing, the particular pitch of a person who had already decided the world was simpler if everything that moved was a threat.
The charge takes the front three. Maybe four. Venna takes the ground and stays there. Then it’s a footrace and she’s still dizzy from the car.
So don’t let it go wrong.
"Are you two infected?" the bald man asked. His eyes moved between our faces, searching for the emptiness that would answer the question for him.
"No, we’re not." Venna and I said it at the same moment. The words left us clean and absolute.
"Then why are you outside at night?"
He started walking toward us. The rifle stayed low but ready. His boots made soft, deliberate sounds on the asphalt. The others held their positions, a loose semicircle of masked faces and unsteady weapons.
"They’re zombies," the girl muttered behind him. The words were almost hopeful.
"We came out for food," I said. "We were told they’re less active after dark. We collect what we need at night and we lock ourselves in during the day."
He stopped and thought about that. The street light caught the grey in his beard. Somewhere far off the organised shouting of Bagins’ people continued, rolling between buildings like distant weather.
"That’s a good idea, actually." He nodded slowly. The rifle barrel dipped another inch. "That’s a genuinely good idea. Have you got any on you now?"
"Yes."
I set the bag down on the road in front of me. The fabric settled with a soft, ordinary sound. The weight of it—the weight I’d complained about across half a district—sat between us like an offering.
"All right." He closed the last of the distance. The smell of him reached us first—sweat, old cloth, the particular sourness of a man who had stopped trusting water. "Here’s how this goes. You give us the food, and we let you walk away. Nobody gets hurt tonight."
"Fine."
I didn’t argue. I pushed the bag toward him with my boot. The fabric slid a short way across the asphalt and stopped.
"I’m King, by the way." He crouched down over it. The joints in his knees complained audibly. "Head of the King’s crew."
He said it like it should mean something. Maybe last week it had. Maybe last week the name had opened doors and settled arguments. Tonight it was just a word spoken over a bag in an empty street.
"What are you doing, King?" The girl again. Her voice had gone thinner, more urgent. "Just kill them and take it."
"I said shut your mouth, Linn." He didn’t look up. His hands were already on the bag’s zipper.
I pulled Venna in against my side. Whatever else happened, we walked out of this street. Some of the others were still standing too straight, still thinking there was an angle in this, still believing the collapse of a city was an opportunity that could make a man into something. Their eyes above the masks kept moving between the bag and us and the dark mouths of the alleys.
King opened the bag.
He reached in and started laying things out on the road.
Ice cubes. A bag of them, sweating through the plastic, already half-melted into a clear, cold puddle that spread under the street light in a small shining pool.
A makeup kit. Compact, brushes, the small ordinary tools of a face that still expected to be looked at.
Four bananas. The skins already soft, the fruit inside beginning to give.
Half a loaf of bread. The plastic bag fogged from the heat of the day that had been trapped inside it.
He looked up at us with his face working through several expressions at once—confusion, disbelief, the particular exhaustion of a man who had just discovered that the thing he’d risked the street for was almost nothing.
I looked down at the road with exactly the same face, because I had carried that bag across half a district and complained about the weight of it, and every gram of it had been ice.
Essentials.
"Why," King said slowly, "are you carrying ice cubes?"
Venna opened her mouth.
The crack tore the whole street apart before she got a word out.
The girl had fired into the air.
The sound went up between the buildings and rolled outward across the district—hard, sharp, absolute. Every window on both sides of the road caught it and threw it further. The echo came back thinner and angrier. Somewhere a dog started barking and then stopped. The organised shouting in the distance faltered for half a second and then resumed, louder.
King came up off the ground fast. The ice cubes scattered under his boots. Water ran across the asphalt in thin, shining lines.
"LINN. What in God’s name are you doing?" He rounded on her. The rifle in his hands was forgotten. "You know the professor is collecting people. You know he’s out there filling the streets. You want us picked up tonight?"
He grabbed the bananas and the bread off the road and turned back to us, and there was something almost apologetic in it—the look of a man who had just remembered that the two people in front of him were still people.
"You’d better run," he said. "Both of you. If they find you out here you’ll be in the front line of an army fighting zombies by morning."
An army. Against them.
That is the single stupidest thing anyone inside these walls has said this week, and this week has had a lot of competition.
King walked off into a side corridor and his crew peeled away after him one at a time. Masks. Weapons. The soft scuff of boots on asphalt. The girl went last.
She stopped at the mouth of the alley and looked back at the two of us standing over a bag of melting ice, the water still spreading under the street light in a small, useless shining. Her eyes above the mask were wide and furious and completely without understanding. Then she was gone.
The street returned to its empty quiet. The ice kept melting. Far off, the shouting continued, and somewhere closer a single set of footsteps moved carefully through an alley that no longer held anyone we needed to fear.