Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"They’re still there." Mercury had both hands locked on the wheel.

I leaned forward between the seats.

They were still there. Hundreds of them, filling the whole width of the road and the ground around the building, and every single one was facing back down the road toward us. The same orientation. The same held attention.

The jeep rolled forward and stopped, the tyres crunching on something. The sound was sharp and wrong.

Behind us the trucks stopped one after another, and then the engines were the only sound in the street.

A hundred metres out. Close enough now to see individual shapes in the headlights.

"Why have you stopped?" Bagins asked.

"Because the road’s covered." Mercury nodded at the windscreen. The beams found the barrier properly now—dark, continuous, running edge to edge across the asphalt. "Thorns. Sharp things. Metal. All the way across."

"What?"

"The zombies didn’t want cars getting past this point."

"No fucking way." Bagins laughed out loud. "Those are zombies. They don’t make plans. They can’t make plans, that’s the entire thing about them."

I looked at it properly.

He was wrong, and I could see exactly how wrong from where I was sitting.

The road was covered edge to edge. The sidewalks on both sides, where no vehicle could fit anyway, were completely clear. The barrier stopped at the kerb with a precision that scattered debris never achieved. Thorns. Lengths of metal. Things that had been chosen for the damage they would do to tyres and undercarriages and left in a line that had nothing random in it.

That isn’t scattered debris. Somebody laid that.

They knew we’d come by road. They heard the trucks, or they heard the broadcast, and they closed the road and left the footpaths open.

They didn’t block us. They chose how we’d arrive.

Not one of them was moving. Not one was drifting or turning or wandering. They were standing in the road waiting, and they’d been waiting since before we got here. The held mass faced us the way the factory crowd had faced Bagins.

This is bigger than any of us thought.

The truck behind us sounded its horn, wanting to know why we’d stopped. The blast rolled up the street and died against the silent mass. Not a single infected turned its head toward the sound.

"So what do we do?" Bagins asked.

"Tell your men to get out of the trucks." I sat back. The decision had already finished forming. "We go on foot."

"No. Absolutely not."

"It’s the only way, Professor." I met his eyes in the mirror. The headlights from behind washed his face in continuous white. "We force our way through them on foot. Isn’t that exactly what those men have been shouting about all night?"

He sat back into his seat and let out a long breath. The joy that had been in his face when we left the warehouse was still there, thinner now, tested against the first real geometry of the night. Outside, the engines continued their collective idle.

"They’ll come at us the second we’re out of the vehicles."

I looked down the road one more time. The held line. The clear sidewalks. The precision of a trap that had left the only available path deliberately open.

"They won’t." I said it with more certainty than I’d expected to have. "They’ve drawn a line. They’re standing on it. It’s ours to cross."

I opened my door and stepped out.

The night air was colder here, closer to the mass. The thorns and the sharp metal ran about thirty metres up the road—a continuous dark band of things designed to shred anything with wheels. Nothing we’d brought would have survived ten of it. The sidewalk to the left sat clear and ordinary under the nearest street light, as if the barrier had been drawn with a ruler and stopped at the exact edge of the asphalt.

Bagins got out. Both women followed. Mercury’s boots hit the ground hard. Venna came around the back of the jeep and stopped beside me, her shoulder finding mine for a second before she straightened.

Bagins walked back down the column, truck to truck, and men came pouring out of each one as he passed it. The sound of four hundred bodies leaving the vehicles filled the street—boots, voices, the continuous scrape of equipment and the low continuous murmur of people who had spent the evening shouting about zombies and were now looking at the real shape of them.

Bagins’ arms went as he moved down the line. Instructions. Formations. The particular urgency of a man converting a truck column into a foot column against a clock he could no longer see.

Then he came back and joined the three of us at the front, and we started walking, four hundred men behind us on a narrow footpath.

The infected didn’t move.

The sidewalk forced us into a single file that kept breaking and reforming. Boots on concrete. The soft continuous sound of a column that had expected the open road and been given, instead, a strip of pavement between buildings and a barrier of thorns.

Ahead of us the mass held its line.

"Do you think we win this?" Bagins asked quietly. The words stayed between the four of us at the front.

"That’s a stupid thing to be thinking about right now," Mercury said. Her eyes stayed on the mass. Both hands hung loose at her sides, ready.

Venna took my hand.

She had never been anywhere near something like this. Not once in a life spent inside her family’s house being told what she was worth. Her fingers closed hard. The pulse in her wrist was fast and visible against my own. I didn’t look at her. Looking would have made the next sifty metres harder for both of us.

I was already running numbers, because we were the front line and there was nobody in front of us.

Distance. Density. The width of the road once we cleared the barrier. The clear fact that four hundred men who had never stood in front of a single infected in their lives were about to walk into a held mass that had already demonstrated it could choose when to move and when to wait. The numbers did not improve with attention. I kept running them anyway.

They came into focus as we walked. Faces. Uniforms on some of them—the same dark fabric the army had worn when Sinn put them on the streets, now hanging on bodies that no longer answered to any command structure Sinn still controlled.

Empty eyes. The particular wrong stillness of the infected when nothing has given them a better idea, except that something had given them an idea, and the idea was to stand here facing us until the order changed.

I looked up at the roof of the building.

The bald girl was standing on the edge of it, and beside her was a man with blonde hair.

Max.

The recognition arrived complete and cold.

Behind the two of them, a handful of figures stood along the roofline, and I knew what they were from their posture alone.

All of them were facing us.

We came off the sharp ground at the thirty metre mark and stepped back down onto clear road, and the infected were fifty metres away.

Bagins. Mercury. My sister. Me.

Nobody in front of us at all.

The asphalt under our boots was ordinary again. The street lights held us in the same hard white they held the mass. Behind us four hundred men continued to pour off the footpath onto the open road, spreading into a wider front as the space allowed, the continuous low sound of a column that had finally been given room and did not yet understand what the room was for.

The line of the infected began to shake. Not moving. Not yet. Just that low tremor running through the whole mass of them, hundreds of bodies vibrating in place, waiting to be released. The movement was wrong in a way that went past horror into something almost mechanical—pure potential, held at the edge of expression, the particular shiver of things that had been told to wait and could feel the order about to change.

Mercury looked sideways at me and nodded once. The same forward energy she had carried onto the raised platform in the warehouse, now stripped of every joke and aimed at fifty metres of open road and the trembling line beyond it.

Venna let go of my hand. Breathed in. Breathed out. Her hair moved once in the night air and settled.

Okay.