Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 7: WHAT THE DEAD DO

The countdown hit zero, and the dead man stopped talking.

For one heartbeat nothing happened. The red panel flickered, spat out a line of broken text, and snapped shut.

Intrusion failed. Link severed.

Then a sound came through the door that was not a voice at all. It started low in a ruined throat, a wet, hungry groan that climbed into a rasping shriek, and something heavy slammed into the wood so hard that the whole frame shook.

"Oh God," Brandon said.

The second blow cracked the top hinge. The third made the deadbolt jump in its housing. Whatever had been wearing that courier's face a moment ago was gone, like a hand pulled out of a glove, and what remained did not speak or smile or count. It only hit the door, and hit it, and hit it, driven by one simple, endless need.

I knew that sound. I had heard it for four months in my old life, through walls and gates and barricades, and I had never once mistaken it for anything but what it was.

"It lost the signal," I whispered, mostly to myself. "Whoever was holding the strings let go."

"Leo!" Vanessa had backed into the hallway wall, both hands pressed to her mouth. "Leo, do something!"

"Get away from the door!"

"Where?" Brandon's voice had gone high and thin. "Where do we go? Where is there to go?"

"The bedroom! The fire escape!"

The door gave another inch. Plaster dust drifted down from the frame, and through the widening gap I saw gray fingers curl around the edge, the nails split and black, scrabbling for purchase. The dead do not feel pain. They do not stop. They only keep coming until something in them breaks, and that something is almost never fast enough.

"Nora," I said into the phone. "Where are you?"

"Parking now." Her breathing was quick. "Do not wait for me. Get out."

"I am going."

I turned toward the bedroom, and Vanessa's hands closed around my arm.

I thought she was pulling me with her. For half a second I even felt a stupid, old flicker of relief, the reflex of six years of believing in her. Then she turned me by the shoulders, with a strength I had never known she had, and she shoved me hard toward the door.

"Hold it!" she screamed. "Just hold it shut, just for a minute!"

The words landed somewhere deep and cold, in the exact place where the gate had slammed.

Someone has to stay behind, she had said once, and it was never going to be Brandon.

I stumbled into the door frame with my shoulder against the shuddering wood, and behind me I heard two sets of footsteps pounding away down the hall. I did not look back. I knew exactly what I would see. Vanessa's face, bright with fear and utterly unashamed.

So this was how it began, I thought, with a strange, distant calm. Not in the fourth month, not at the loading dock. It began right here, in a living room that smelled of lavender, the first time the world frightened them enough.

The door buckled.

I did not think about what I did next. I let go of the frame, dropped to my knees, and slapped my palm against the heavy oak shoe bench beside the entrance.

Store.

The bench vanished, and the dead man, who had been throwing his whole weight against the door, lost the only thing holding him upright. The hinge tore free. The door crashed inward. The courier fell across the threshold, face-first, in a tangle of gray limbs and a faded uniform, and I scrambled backward on my hands with my heart screaming in my ears.

He was on his feet in two seconds.

His head came up, jerking, searching. Those clouded white eyes swept the room without really seeing it, and his jaw worked open and shut, open and shut, with a click of broken teeth. The rash had crept up past his ears now. His nostrils flared at the air, and then he turned, with a horrible, unhurried certainty, toward the sound of running feet.

Toward the bedroom.

Toward Vanessa and Brandon.

He lurched.

"No," I heard myself say. "No, no, wait."

I do not know why. They had left me to die twice in two lifetimes. But I was already moving, already grabbing the heavy brass lamp from the side table and swinging it with both hands, and it connected with the side of his skull with a sickening crunch that rang all the way up my arms.

It did not stop him. It only turned him around.

He lunged at me, mouth gaping, and I threw myself sideways and caught the edge of the coffee table across my hip. Pain flared white. His fingers raked my sleeve and tore the cotton to ribbons. I smelled him then, cold earth and old copper and something sweet beneath it, and I thought very clearly, not like this, not on the first night.

A metal crack split the air.

The courier's head snapped sideways. A second blow, a tire iron swung with perfect, practiced efficiency, caught him behind the ear, and his knees folded. He dropped to the carpet without a sound and did not move again.

Nora Vale stood over him in the broken doorway, breathing hard, her gray jacket flecked with rain, one hand still gripping the iron. Her short hair was soaked and plastered to her forehead, and her eyes were wide, and furious, and very bright.

"Are you bitten?" she demanded, dropping to her knees beside me.

"No. I do not think so."

"Do not think. Show me." Her hands were already on my arm, turning it in the light, pushing back what was left of my torn sleeve. Her fingers were cold and quick and astonishingly gentle. She checked my wrist, my forearm, the angle of my neck. "Skin unbroken," she said at last, and the breath she let out was shakier than she probably wanted me to hear. "You are lucky."

"You came," I said stupidly.

"I said I would."

A scream tore through the apartment.

It was Vanessa's, high and ragged, and it came from the bedroom. I was on my feet before I knew it, and Nora was beside me, and together we ran down the hall.

The bedroom window stood wide open. The fire escape beyond it was empty and dripping. Brandon lay against the foot of the bed with his left arm clutched to his chest, and between his fingers, bright red against his pale skin, was a ragged crescent of teeth marks.

The second one. There had been a second one on the fire escape, and it was already gone, dragged back into the dark.

"Leo," Vanessa sobbed, crawling toward me across the carpet, her mascara running in black lines. "Leo, he is bleeding, he is going to die, you have to help him. You have medicine. I know you do. I heard what that thing said."

Brandon looked up at me. Beneath the sweat, beneath the terror, his veins were turning dark, branching up from the wound like ink poured into water. I had seen that in my old life. It had always taken hours.

It had taken him less than a minute.

Nora's hand closed around my sleeve, and her voice, low and unsteady, dropped beside my ear.

"Leo," she said. "It is not slowing down."