Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 9: THE CITY WAKES HUNGRY

"Do not leave us," Vanessa begged.

She clung to my sleeve in the hallway with both hands, her face wet and swollen, and behind her Brandon lay motionless on the bed with a towel knotted around his arm. For six years that grip had meant something to me. Now it only felt like a rope that had been cut a long time ago and had not yet realized it was loose.

"Lock the bedroom door," I said. "Push the dresser against it. Do not open it for anyone, not for me, not for a neighbor, not for a voice you recognize."

"Leo, please. Someone has to stay with us."

"Yes." I gently unpeeled her fingers one at a time. "Someone does."

She understood. I watched it reach her eyes, the memory she could not possibly have, the echo of a sentence she had never said in this life, and she let go of me as though I had burned her.

Nora was already halfway down the stairwell. I followed.

The city I had walked through that morning had vanished.

It was not dark, exactly. Streetlights still burned along the avenue, and the rain still fell in a silver curtain, but every window had a face in it, pale and watching, and the pavement was strewn with abandoned shoes and spilled groceries and one overturned stroller. Somewhere to the east, a siren wound itself higher and higher and then broke off in the middle of a note.

"The outbreak is not supposed to be here," I said, as Nora wrenched open her car door. "Not yet. Not for six more weeks."

"So you keep saying." She did not look at me. "Get in."

I did.

We made it three blocks before the first body hit the windshield.

It was a man in a bathrobe, thrown from a second-floor window, and he struck the hood with a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. Nora swerved. The tires screamed. She stamped on the brake, and in the glare of her headlights I saw them come out of the apartment lobby, six of them, eight, then more, dragging themselves across the wet asphalt in their pajamas and their work uniforms and their ruined Sunday best.

They did not groan this time. They only ran.

In my old life, the dead had shuffled for the first month, slow and stupid, easy to outpace. These were not that. These were fast and low and silent, with their jaws wide and their eyes empty, and they hit the car like a wave.

"Go!" I shouted.

Nora slammed the accelerator, and the car tore down the avenue. Something caught in the rear bumper and tore loose with a wet, ripping crunch, and in the mirror I saw a woman in a nurse's tunic fall under the wheels and rise again, undamaged, still running.

Then I saw the street corner, and I wished I had not.

A family had been walking home. Two parents and a boy of about nine, still holding their takeout bags. They had stopped dead in the middle of the crosswalk as the horde came around the corner, and the father had pushed his son behind him and spread both arms, as if he could make himself wide enough to stop them.

He was gone in a heartbeat. I did not see what happened to the mother. I only saw the boy, standing very still with a paper bag hanging from his hand, and then the gray crowd closed over him, and the car turned the corner.

Nora made a sound in her throat, small and raw. Her knuckles were white on the wheel.

"Do not look back," she said. "Do not."

I pressed my fist hard against my mouth. In my last life I had done this over and over, seen it all, memorized the exact pitch of every scream, and I had told myself that it was easier when you knew it was coming. I had been wrong. Knowing only meant that I had one more thing to carry.

The hospital rose out of the rain like a lit ship.

Every window on the first two floors blazed with light, and the parking lot was a chaos of abandoned cars with open doors and headlights still burning. A crowd of survivors had gathered near the main entrance, a few hundred of them, huddled under the awning in coats and blankets and hospital gowns. Some wept. Some stared. Some held each other with the stiff, blank grip of people who no longer know what else to do with their hands.

And moving among them, calm as a priest, with a steaming thermos in each hand, was a man in a navy wool coat.

"Gideon," Nora breathed.

He turned, as if he had heard her through the glass. When he saw us, his whole face lit with a warm, tired, enormous relief, and he lifted one thermos in greeting.

Behind him stood a line of white vans with the Pierce Relief Foundation logo on every door. Their rear hatches hung open. Volunteers in yellow vests were handing out blankets, water bottles, and boxed rations to anyone who held out a hand. I counted a dozen vans. In my old life, no relief organization had mobilized for the first three weeks.

No one had been prepared. No one except us.

"Dr. Vale!" Gideon came across the lot at a brisk, easy walk, ignoring the rain, ignoring the wail of sirens, ignoring the thin, distant shrieks rising from somewhere inside the east wing. "Mr. Hart. I had a feeling I would see you both tonight."

Nora climbed out of the car. "Gideon, what are you doing here? The isolation ward has turned. We have to evacuate the lower floors."

"The lower floors have been evacuated. My people started an hour ago." He said it gently, as if comforting a child. "I got the call at midnight. A donor at the health department. He said the records were being sealed again."

"You knew?" Nora's voice cracked. "You knew this was coming and you did not say a word?"

"I knew something was coming. I did not know what." Gideon spread his hands, rain beading on his sleeves. "I did what I could. I filled the vans."

There was nothing wrong with that answer. It was a good answer, honest and humble and entirely believable. The crowd behind him was already murmuring his name with a kind of grateful awe. I should have felt relief.

Instead I felt a slow, cold crawl up the back of my neck, because I had been standing in the rain for ten seconds and my sleeves were soaked, but his coat was perfectly dry.

"Come," he said, and laid a hand lightly on my shoulder. "You look half frozen. Have some tea."

He poured it for me himself, and when he pressed the cup into my fingers, his head tipped close to mine, and his voice dropped so low that not even Nora could hear.

"Forty-four days," Gideon murmured. "That was the number you had, wasn't it?"

The cup nearly slipped from my hand.

"Mine was forty-three," he said, and smiled.