Apocalypse: Zero Empathy

The Sergeant Learns to Whispe

The sergeant stopped shouting at six-ten.

Silas noticed it before he understood it. The rumble through the pipes thinned and then died, and on the monitor the common room went strangely still. Three men stood in a loose triangle around the fire barrel, rifles raised, staring at the sealed door of the side passage as if it might speak.

"Open it," the sergeant said. It was the first thing he had said in a low voice since Silas arrived.

Mercer hesitated. "Sarge, the door's locked. Locked from outside."

"Doors don't lock themselves."

"Then somebody's in the walls."

"Nobody's in the walls." But the sergeant's eyes moved to the camera in the corner, the small black dome that had been dead for two days. The indicator light on it was now a steady, patient red.

Silas watched him see it.

The sergeant stood very still. Then, slowly, he raised one hand, and for a moment Silas thought the man might wave. Instead he pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at the lens. *I see you.*

Silas did not move. On the console beside him sat a microphone, a gray stalk on a flexible neck. He considered it. Speaking would cost him the advantage of being unknown. A man who is a ghost frightens people. A man who is a voice can be bargained with.

He kept his hand off the switch.

"He's in the system," the sergeant said, quiet now, almost to himself. "The scavenger. He got down to Level 2." He turned to Pike. "You said the closet was unlocked."

"You said not to lock it!"

"I said not to lock it because I didn't think he'd walk." The sergeant rubbed his face. "Dev had a clearance card. I know he did. The bastard never admitted it." He looked at the sealed passage. "And now Dev's gone, and Harlan's gone, and we're standing in a room with a camera we can't shoot out because it's the only thing in this place that works."

Mercer swallowed. "So what do we do?"

"We go down. We find the control room. We drag him out by his teeth."

"Down where? We don't have the card."

"There's a manual override on every stairwell door. Fire code. You think the army wouldn't build a crank for it?"

Silas felt the first cold prickle of a problem. He pulled up **DOOR MANAGEMENT** and found it at once: the stairwell door to Level 2, marked amber instead of green. *Manual release available.* He could lock it electronically, but a crank bypassed the lock. The bunker's builders had not wanted soldiers trapped by their own machines.

*Fine.*

He looked at the control room around him: one door, one stairwell, one approach. A corridor forty meters long, with a landing in the middle. He considered the pistol on the console, the magazine and a half. Three men with rifles would win a straight fight.

So it would not be a fight.

He opened **ENVIRONMENTAL** again and scrolled. Ventilation controls, temperature settings, pressure zones. Lights. On the Level 2 stairwell, every fixture could be dimmed or cut independently. He studied the schematic for a long moment, then set the lights in the stairwell to a slow, irregular flicker, and dropped the temperature in the corridor by twenty degrees.

It was not a weapon. It was weather.

The sergeant found the crank behind a panel and spun it with a screech of metal. The door to the stairwell shuddered open. He took the lead, his rifle sweeping the dark, with Mercer behind and Pike last, white-faced, clutching his weapon like a handrail.

On the monitor, their green figures descended.

"It's cold," Pike whispered.

"Shut up."

"I can see my breath."

"I said shut *up*."

The flicker hit them on the fourth step. Light, dark, light. Each pulse froze them in a different posture, a gun at the shoulder, a hand on the rail, a face turned back. The sergeant swore. Mercer fired a round at nothing, and the crack of it rolled down the stairwell like a thrown stone.

Silas did not flinch. He had learned, ninety-one days ago, that noise was a currency. Mercer had just spent a lot of it, and in a place like this, someone always collected.

Beyond the control room, past the reinforced door and the long dark corridor, something stirred in the ventilation.

He heard it first as a whisper in the ducts. A scrape. A soft, wet exhale like the one he had felt in the ash. The mutated thing from the storm had found its way in, drawn by the warmth and the sudden gunfire, and it was moving through the maintenance crawlspaces with the unhurried patience of a creature that had never once been afraid of anything.

*Here,* Silas thought. *Now.*

He did not control it. He had no way to. But he could see it, a long pale shape crawling through a duct above the sergeant's party, and he could do the one useful thing a man in his position could do. He opened the stairwell's ventilation grate.

A seam of darkness slid open in the ceiling.

Mercer screamed first, a raw, animal sound with no words in it. The thing dropped between him and the sergeant, long-limbed and gray, its joints bending in the wrong places, its jaw hinged too wide. It took Mercer by the shoulder and he went down on the stairs, kicking. The sergeant wheeled and fired, three shots, four, the muzzle flare turning the stairwell into a lightning storm. Pike was shouting something that might have been a prayer.

Silas watched all of it with his hands folded in his lap.

When it ended, Mercer was no longer moving. The sergeant had backed against the wall with a bleeding arm and an empty magazine, and the creature crouched over what was left, head cocked, listening to the echo of its own meal.

It lifted its face toward the camera.

For a moment, impossibly, it seemed to look at him.

Then it turned and slid back into the vent, dragging its prize, and the grate shuddered shut. Silas had already closed it.

The sergeant slid down the wall and sat. Pike stood frozen beside him, rifle shaking. Neither spoke. In the cold, fluttering light they looked like two men at the bottom of a well.

At last the sergeant raised his head and looked into the lens.

"Who are you?" he said.

His voice was a whisper, and Silas realized, with a small, cold satisfaction, that the man had learned the first law of the new world a little too late.

He reached for the switch beside the microphone. The room filled with a faint hiss as the line opened.

"Someone you should have left alone," Silas said, and his own voice, distorted by the old speakers into something flat and mechanical, did not sound like a man at all.

Down in the stairwell, Pike began to cry.