The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

One O'Clock

Nobody moved.

Ruth had one hand on Dale's shoulder. Gil stood behind the register with his bat held low, like a man who had finally found a use for it. Lena had stopped breathing, or close to it. I held up a flat palm and pressed the other finger to my lips, and the room went quiet.

The bell over the door rang once more, soft, almost apologetic.

"Mr. Cole," the voice said again. "We saw you cross the avenue. We don't mean to alarm anyone."

I moved along the wall, keeping below the window line, and put one eye to the gap in the blinds.

A single man stood on the step. He was in his fifties, thin, with a gray cardigan buttoned wrong by one button and reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He looked like someone's favorite uncle. His hands were folded in front of him, empty, and a strip of white cloth was knotted at his left wrist. Behind him on the sidewalk, in four neat rows of five and a couple of stragglers, stood the people from the hardware store. They hadn't come closer than the curb. Not one of them looked at the pharmacy. They looked at the back of the old man's head.

Twenty-two people had walked six blocks in twenty minutes through a city that was eating itself, and not one of them had a scratch on them.

"Not interested," I said through the door.

"I understand. May I at least explain?"

"You can explain from where you are."

"Of course." He sounded pleased, as if I had passed a small test. "My name is Arthur Pell. I was a high school chemistry teacher until about an hour ago. We have a secure building with a stocked storeroom, two hundred gallons of water, and a rooftop that can be held. We have room for you and your friends. We would very much like you to come with us."

"Who told you I'd be here?"

"A friend."

"What friend?"

"I wasn't asked to say." Pell smiled apologetically, and I could hear it in his voice. "She was clear that it would be better coming from her. She asked us to keep a place for you at Kessler's and to invite you to take it. She was also very clear that we were not to force the matter. So I am asking."

"And Lena?"

I hadn't meant to say her name. It slipped out, the way a bad habit does.

Pell paused. It was only a fraction of a second.

"We would be glad to have a healer," he said. "Your friend is welcome. As is everyone in there."

Behind me, Lena made a small sound. I didn't turn around.

I thought about it for about as long as it takes to read this. Kessler's was exactly the building I wanted. Heavy gate, big stockroom, a roof I could build a kill zone on. Twenty-two people with white wristbands who moved in step and did not flinch at the sky, led by a man who said please. A woman who had cleaned out the pharmacy to leave Dale an empty shelf. A note that told me not to go there, and now a man at the door who wanted me to.

Someone wanted me in that building very badly. Someone else had warned me away. Neither of them had given me a reason, and that was the part I couldn't forgive.

"No," I said.

"May I ask why?"

"Because you knew my name before I crossed the street."

"Ah." He didn't sound offended. "That is fair."

"Where are you from? The group. The wristbands. Who gave them out?"

"We were gathered," Pell said, choosing the word with care. "That's all I can say. It was kind of her to think of us."

"Her."

"I misspoke. I'm sorry. You must be very tired, Mr. Cole." He took one step back. "I'll leave you in peace. If you change your mind, we'll be at Kessler's. We're not going anywhere. Nobody will bother you on the way."

"Nobody."

"No."

Something in the way he said it made the back of my neck prickle. It wasn't a promise. It was a statement of fact, like the time of day.

He turned and walked down the steps. The rows turned with him, as one body, and followed him up Ninth Avenue. They didn't look back. A pair of infected shuffled out of an alley ahead of them, and the twenty-two simply stopped. The infected stopped too. For a long moment the two groups faced each other in the road.

Then the infected turned around and walked the other way.

"Did you see that?" Dale whispered. He had crawled to the window beside me, still pale, his dust mask pulled down around his chin. "The zombies just left."

"Yes."

"Why would they do that?"

"I don't know." It was the truth, and it bothered me a great deal.

I let the blinds fall shut. The room had that dead, listening quiet that follows a fright. I turned and looked at them: a bald pharmacist with a baseball bat, a trauma nurse with her bag in her lap, a barista still recovering from a gland, a nursing student with a scalpel she had forgotten she was holding. Five people. None of them were soldiers. All of them were looking at me.

It was an uncomfortable thing to be looked at that way. I had spent ten years being the person who followed orders, or the person who gave them to people who didn't survive them. I didn't want this again.

"Listen to me," I said. "All of you."

Ruth set down her bag.

"In a few hours it's going to be dark, and tonight is the worst night this city will ever have. We have to get off the street and hold a building until morning. I know where I'm taking you, and I'm going to ask you to trust me. I know that's a lot." I met each of their eyes in turn. "There's one rule. When I give an instruction, you follow it first and ask why after. If we survive until morning, I'll tell you everything. If I'm wrong, you can leave. But on the street, in the middle of it, there's no time to vote."

"Is that really your rule?" Ruth asked. "Only one?"

"Only one."

She looked at the others. Gil gave a small shrug. Dale grinned, a little crookedly.

"I'm in," said Dale. "I've been in since the mop."

Lena said nothing for a moment. Then she stood, wiped the scalpel carefully on her scrubs, and tucked it into her jacket pocket.

"I'll follow it," she said. "But if you ask me to leave somebody behind, I'm going to argue."

"That's fair."

"I'm going to argue loudly."

"I'd expect nothing else."

For the first time in ten years, I felt something that was not quite hope but lived in the same building. I looked down at my hands. They were shaking, finally, a fine tremor along the fingers that I had held down since the cafe. I made fists to hide it.

When I looked up, Lena was watching me. She didn't say anything. She only nodded once, very slightly, and looked away.

I picked up the axe and went to the door.

That was when the Crown spoke again.

It came without the usual warning, a pressure behind my breastbone and a silver window in the corner of my sight. I braced for another bond, another offer.

It was something else.

[Hollow Crown: Dominion signatures detected within 500 meters.]

[Count: 22.]

[Origin: bonded. Owner: not you.]

I stood with my hand on the doorknob and read it three times.

Someone else carried a Hollow Crown. Someone else had opened the chest I had thought was mine alone, or opened another like it. And for some time before noon, they had been collecting people.

On the other side of the glass, the street was empty. Pell and his rows had vanished around the corner, as if they had never been there.

But on the pavement, directly in front of the pharmacy step, lay a small, neat pile of cream-colored envelopes. Twenty-two of them. Each one tied with a strip of white cloth. Each one with my name on it, in the same slanted handwriting as the note in the cafe.