“I said, hey up there—you on the Seaboard. You on the roof. Have you got a mask or are you dying?”
Briar hadn’t seen any indication that this was the Seaboard, but she couldn’t imagine who else the voice could be addressing. So she answered, as loud as she could, “Yes! I’ve got a mask!”
“What?”
“I said, I’ve got a mask!”
“I can hear you, but I can’t understand you for shit—so I hope that means you’ve got a mask! Whoever you are, get down and cover your goddamned ears!”
She looked frantically back and forth across the small sea of rotters, seeking the source of the instructions. “Where are you?” she tried to shout back, and it was ridiculous because she knew that wherever the speaker was, he’d never catch the question over the roiling symphony of the undead on the street.
“I said,” the low voice with the metallic edge repeated, “get down and cover your goddamned ears!”
Across the road, looking out from another broken window in another broken building, Briar glimpsed motion. Something bright and blue glimmered sharply, then winked out—only to be followed by a brighter light and a high-pitched, whirring hum. The hum carried up through the Blight and whistled past her hair, delivering a determined warning directly into her brain.
She didn’t need to be told a third time.
She ducked, flinging herself into the nearest corner and throwing her arms up over her head. Her elbows clenched tight around her ears and muffled them, but it wasn’t enough to keep out the needle-sharp wheedling of the electric whine. She pulled up her satchel and wrapped it around her skull, and she was still holding that position, facedown against the tar paper and bricks, when a blast pulsed through the blocks with a gut-turning pop that lasted far too long to be the report of a gun.
When the worst of the shattering, thundering audio blow had dissipated, Briar heard the almost-mechanical voice gargle out another set of instructions, but she couldn’t hear it and she couldn’t move.
Her eyes were jammed shut, her arms were locked around her head, her knees were fixed in place beneath her body, and she couldn?
??t budge any of them. “I can’t,” she whispered, trying to convey, “I can’t hear you,” but her jaw was stuck, too.
“Get up now! GET UP, NOW!”
“I can’t…”
“You have about three minutes to get your ass up and get down here before the rotters get their bearings back, and when that happens, I’m going to be gone! If you want to stay alive in here, you need me, you crazy bastard!”
Briar muttered, “Not a bastard,” at the distinctly masculine tirade. She tried to focus her irritation and turn it into a motive to move. It worked no better and no worse than the screamed demands with their monstrous inflections.
Joint by joint she unfixed her arms and legs, and she stuttered to her knees.
She dropped to them again in order to retrieve the rifle, which had slid down off her shoulder. Heaving that shoulder to retrieve the strap, she once again forced her boots up underneath herself. Her ears were ringing with that horrible sound, and with the horrible cries of the man down on the street—he wouldn’t stop yelling, even though she’d lost her capacity to understand him. She couldn’t stand, walk, and listen at the same time, not so shaken as she was.
Behind her, the door to the stairwell was still open, sagging on its latch.
She fell against it, and nearly fell down the subsequent steps. Only her momentum and her instinct for balance kept her upright and moving forward. Her body swayed and tried to tumble, but the longer she remained on her feet, the easier it became to stay that way. By the time she’d reached the first floor she was almost running again.
Down in the lobby, all the windows were covered and it was darker than midnight except for the spots where slivers of the dim afternoon light leaked drably through the cracks. As Briar’s eyes corrected themselves to account for the dark, she saw that the desk was covered with dust and the floor was crisscrossed with more black footprints.
There was a big front door with a massive plank across it.
Briar yanked it up and rattled the door’s handles.
The panic she felt was amazing. She would’ve sworn that she’d exhausted her store of manic fear, but when the door wouldn’t budge she felt another surge. She shook it and tried to yell through it, “Hello? Hello? Are you out there?”
Even to her own ears the cry was garbled. No one on the other side could possibly hear it, and it was stupid of her, anyway—she should’ve gone back downstairs and risked another ladder. Why had she gone all the way to the ground floor? What had she been thinking?
Her head was humming with leftover pain and her eyes were swimming with static.
“Help me, please, get me out of here!”
She beat the door with the butt of her rifle, and it created a magnificent racket.
Seconds later, another racket met it from the other side.