Chapter 60: The Lower Floor's Threat
Rosa hit the fourth floor landing at a run, one hand on the railing, the other still gripping the hatchet. The bang had come from below, low and hollow, like a door meeting something heavy. Like something meeting a door.
She took the next flight two steps at a time. Her boots slapped wet concrete. The air down here was wrong, colder than the rest of the building, and it carried that smell she knew too well. That sweet, rotten tang that meant Walkers had been bleeding or dying or both.
Third floor landing. Empty. The stairwell door was ajar, the hallway beyond it dark.
"What are you looking at?" Rosa muttered to no one, and kept moving.
The ground floor door hung crooked on its hinges. One of the hinges had torn clean out of the frame, leaving a jagged splash of splintered wood and rusted metal. Behind it, the basement door stood open, its lock plate gouged and bent. The barricade had been a shelf unit, a filing cabinet, and two sandbags. Now the shelf unit lay on its side, its contents scattered across the floor. The sandbags had split open. Sand dust hung in the air, catching the flickering light.
The fluorescent bulb above her stuttered. On, off, on. Each burst threw long shadows across the stairwell walls. Rosa stepped through the doorway, hatchets up, elbows tight to her ribs.
The corridor stretched away from her, lined with doors that used to be offices. One door at the far end stood open. The darkness inside it was absolute. But something stood in that doorway, something that breathed slow and wet, and when the light flickered again, Rosa saw its face turn toward her.
Not shambling. Not wandering. Its head swiveled with a smooth, deliberate motion, like a lens tracking a target. Its eyes were milky, filmed over, but they found her anyway. Held her.
Rosa's grip tightened on the hatchet handles. The familiar weight grounded her. She'd fought dozens of these things, hundreds maybe, over the last two years. They never moved like this. They never looked at you like they knew you were there.
The Walker took a step forward. Then another. Its gait was wrong too, steadier than the shambling they'd learned to predict. It came down the corridor at a pace that wasn't a lurch and wasn't a run, and Rosa felt something cold settle in her chest.
Silas. That was her first thought, a spike of hate and fear. The way that man had moved the horde in the sewer, the way he'd aimed his ray gun at her, the way he'd looked at Roy. This was his work. This was his reach.
She planted her feet, one boot forward, and waited. The other door behind her, the one to the stairwell, would be her exit if she needed it. But that door led away from Roy, and Roy was three inches tall on the common room table with Lee and Jason and a machine that had just proven it could work.
She wasn't leaving.
The Walker came within ten feet and stopped. Its head tilted, like it was listening to something only it could hear. Then its mouth opened, and it screamed, a high, keening sound that tore through the corridor and rang off the concrete walls.
Rosa heard footsteps above her. Many footsteps, moving fast.
She rushed the Walker.
The scream hit the common room like a physical thing. It rattled the windows, bounced off the walls, and sent the card deck sliding off the table. Roy felt it in his bones, a vibration that ran through the wood and up through his tiny feet.
Lee was already on his feet, his glasses catching the light. Jason had moved halfway to the door, one hand on the frame, his knuckles white.
"That was her," Roy said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. He was on the table, next to the reversion prototype, the glass chamber still humming from the hen test. "She's in trouble."
The screams echoed again, fainter but still there, and now Roy could hear other sounds underneath. Footsteps. Shouts. The unmistakable clash of metal against something wet and heavy.
Lee was staring at the prototype, then at Roy, then back at the prototype. His jaw worked.
"The system needs calibration," Lee said. "We tested it on a hen. One point eight kilograms. You're what, ninety grams? The power differential could—"
"Lee." Roy walked to the edge of the glass chamber and put his hand on the rim. "Do it. She needs us."
Lee didn't hesitate. He crossed the room in three strides, his fingers finding the controls with a speed that belied his usual careful deliberation. The machine whined, a low building hum that rose in pitch until it was almost painful.
"Jason," Lee said, not looking up. "The harness. Get him in the chamber. Now."
Jason moved. His hands were shaking but he was careful, scooping Roy up with a gentleness that made Roy's chest ache, and placed him in the center of the glass chamber. The floor of it was still warm from the hen, faintly slick where she'd balked and struggled.
Roy lay flat, arms at his sides, looking up at the ceiling of the chamber. Through the glass he could see Lee's face, lit from below by the prototype's power readouts. The looking was intense. Focused. He wasn't hesitating.
"I need you to hold still," Lee said. "No matter what it feels like. This is going to be fast, and it's going to hurt."
From somewhere below, another scream tore through the building. Rosa. Roy had heard her yell before, in the sewer, in the hardware store, in a dozen fights. He'd heard her angry, he'd heard her scared, he'd heard her triumphant. This was none of those. This was a sound he'd never heard from her before, and it was a sound he never wanted to hear again.
"Do it," he said.
Lee's fingers moved and the world went white.
The light was wrong, the geometry was wrong. Roy felt himself stretching, filling, the pressure of a hundred thousand fists pushing outward from inside his ribs. His skin burned like it was being peeled off in layers and regrown at the same time. His bones cracked and knitted and cracked again in the space of a heartbeat.
He heard himself scream, a sound simultaneously tiny and enormous, and then he heard it stop.
Silence. Total silence.
Roy opened his eyes. The ceiling of the chamber was inches from his face instead of the vast canopy of glass it had been. His arms, his legs, his whole body felt wrong, heavy, dense, like he'd been poured from lead and left to set. He tried to move his hand and it worked, but it was too big, too far away from his eyes, attached to a wrist thick as a rope.
He had a wrist. He had wrists the size of his former entire body. He had fingers long enough to grasp, palms broad enough to hold.
He pushed up on one elbow. The chamber, which had been a vast glass fortress around his three-inch frame, now fit him like a coffin. His shoulders pressed against the walls. His knees bent against the floor.
"Roy?" Lee's voice sounded like it was coming through water. "Roy, can you hear me? Can you move?"
Roy lifted his hand, the glass scraping his knuckles, and pressed his palm flat against the side of the chamber. His hand was normal sized. His hand was the size it had always been, the size it had been before the alley, before the ray gun, before an entire season of living in the hollow of Rosa's collarbone.
He was back.
Below them, the screaming stopped.
The silence was worse than the screaming. Rosa stood in the dark hallway, her breath coming in ragged gasps that fogged the air in front of her. The cut on her forearm burned, a deep, angry throb that pulsed with every heartbeat. Her left arm hung awkwardly at her side, the ripped-off sleeve wrapped tight around the break, but she'd cinched it so hard that her fingers were starting to tingle.
She flexed them. They moved. That would do.
Fifteen walkers. She'd counted them twice. Fifteen shambling shapes at the far end of the corridor, pressed together in the dim light, their milky eyes all fixed on her with that wrong, knowing focus. The one she'd killed lay at her feet, its skull split clean, but the others weren't backing off. They never did.
The one she'd rushed had gone down easy. The second one, the one that had grabbed her arm and twisted, that one had cost her the bone. She remembered the sound, a wet snap that she'd felt more than heard, and the way she'd buried her other hatchet in its temple before it could finish the job.
Now she was down one arm and there were still fifteen of them.
"Come on then," she said. Her voice came out raw, scraped thin by the screaming. "What are you waiting for?"
The walkers didn't answer. They stood there, swaying slightly, their heads tilted at that same listening angle. She'd seen them do this before, in the sewer, when Silas had been directing the horde. They moved when he moved them. They stopped when he stopped.
He was here. Somewhere. Watching.
Rosa took a step forward. The walkers shifted, a ripple running through their ranks, and the one at the front opened its mouth and gurgled. It wasn't the scream from before. This was lower, wetter. Hungrier.
She was going to have to do this one at a time. With one arm. Against fifteen of them.
Her grip tightened on the hatchet in her right hand. The weight of it was familiar, grounding, the only steady thing in a body that was shaking with adrenaline and blood loss. She could feel the warmth of the blood soaking through her sleeve, the wet slide of it against her skin.
She took another step. The walkers surged.
They came at her in a wave, not the coordinated push she'd expected, but a chaotic, stumbling flood of twisting bodies and reaching hands. Rosa planted her feet, kicked the first one in the chest hard enough to send it toppling backward into the others, and swung.
The hatchet bit deep. She wrenched it free, stepped into the gap, and swung again.
Metal through flesh. Wet, yielding, then catching on bone. She twisted the blade and yanked, and the third walker crumpled at her feet. Another one lunged, and she sidestepped, letting its momentum carry it past her, and brought the hatchet down on the back of its skull.
Four.
The tingling in her fingers was worse now, spreading up her wrist. She'd cut the circulation with the sleeve wrap. She had maybe a minute before the hand went numb and useless. Maybe less.
Five went down. Six. Someone was screaming again, and it took her a second to realize it was her.
The seventh grabbed her good arm. She slammed her forehead into its face, felt the cartilage of its nose crunch against her brow, and drove her hatchet into its throat. It gurgled and went down, and she was already moving past it, into the press of them, because stopping meant dying and dying meant leaving Roy alone again.
Eight.
She couldn't feel her left arm anymore. It swung uselessly at her side, the weight of it pulling at her shoulder. She drove forward on sheer momentum, her boots slipping on the blood-slicked floor, her hatchet rising and falling and rising again.
Nine. Ten.
There was a crash from above. A scream, muffled by concrete and distance, and for one horrible moment she thought it was Roy, that something had gone wrong with the machine, that he was hurt, that he was —
Then the sound stopped. A different silence. A waiting silence.
Eleven. Twelve.
Her arm was on fire. No, not on fire. It was cold, a deep, spreading numbness that crept up past her elbow and settled in her shoulder. She had the distant thought that she should be worried about that, that shock was setting in, that she was going to pass out soon if she didn't stop bleeding.
Thirteen.
She was down to two. The last two stood together, shoulder to shoulder, their heads tracking her with that silas-bright purpose. She planted her feet, sucked in a breath that tasted like copper, and went at them.
The first went down with the hatchet buried in its eye socket. She left it there, let the weight of the blade drag it free, and turned on the last one.
It was close. Too close. Its hands closed on her shoulders and bore her backward, and she felt her heels catch on something wet and give way. She hit the floor hard, the breath knocked out of her, the hatchet skittering out of her grip and spinning away into the dark.
The walker was on top of her, its face inches from hers, its jaw working, its milky eyes fixed and knowing. She got her hands up, her one good hand and her one numb one, and locked them around its throat, keeping its teeth from her face.
It was strong. Wrongly strong, like the first one, like all of them. She'd never known walkers to be strong before. The ones they'd fought at Anderson Hall were shambling, clumsy, easy to put down.
These were not.
Her arms were shaking. The numb one was giving out, her hand slipping on the walker's neck. She could hear herself making a sound, a low, desperate keening that she didn't have the breath to stop.
The walker's head tilted. Its mouth opened.
Then something hit it. Hard. From the side, a heavy, solid impact that knocked it clean off her and sent it rolling across the floor.
Rosa blinked. Blinked again.
Roy stood over her, breathing hard, his fists clenched, his eyes blazing. He was big. He was full size, six foot five of him, filling the corridor like he'd been carved from the dark. There was a fresh cut on his cheek, a bruise already darkening along his jaw, but he was standing. He was there.
"Roy," she said. And then, stupidly, "You're big."
He turned, looked down at her, and his face crumpled into something fierce and tender all at once. "You're bleeding."
"Later. The walkers."
"Handled." He gestured back the way he'd come, toward a pile of crumpled, still shapes. "I was fast. Lee said the reversion might leave me disoriented. It did not."
She laughed, a wet, broken sound. "That's my brother."
He knelt beside her, his big hands hovering over her arm, over the sleeve wrap, his touch impossibly gentle. "We're going home. And Rosa?"
She looked up at him.
"I'm going to carry you."
She opened her mouth to say something, to tell him not to be an idiot, that she could walk, that he was the one who'd just been through a machine that turned hens back into full-sized birds. But the words never came.
The pain in her arm seized. It wasn't the dull throb she'd been riding. It was a bolt. Icy cold shot up from her wrist, through her elbow, into her shoulder, and then down into her chest like someone had poured a glacier down her sleeve. Her vision tilted. The flickering bulb above her stuttered once, twice, and then the whole world went grey at the edges and folded in on itself.
She didn't feel herself fall. She didn't feel Roy's hands catch her, or his voice shouting her name, or the way he scooped her up against his chest with a gentleness that didn't match the size of him. She was already gone, swallowed by a dark that smelled like old concrete and blood and the faint, sweet rot of the walkers she'd left behind.
Roy held her. Her body was slack against him, her head lolling against his shoulder, her broken arm hanging at an angle that made his stomach turn. The sleeve wrap she'd cinched was dark with blood, soaked through, and her fingers were a strange, waxy white.
"Rosa." He said her name like a prayer. "Rosa, wake up."
She didn't stir.
He lifted her, adjusting his grip so her weight settled across his arms. She was lighter than he remembered. She'd always been solid, compact, the kind of person who felt denser than she looked. But now she sagged in his hold like she was made of nothing but exhausted flesh and broken bone.
The corridor stretched dark in front of him. Behind him, the pile of still shapes he'd left when he'd heard her scream. The bodies of walkers he'd torn through with his bare hands and a fire extinguisher he'd found on the third floor landing. He didn't remember most of it. Just the screaming. Just the need to get to her.
He started walking.
The stairwell was a mess of sand dust and splintered wood. The door hung crooked on its hinges, and he had to shoulder it open one-handed while keeping her braced against him. The fluorescent bulb above flickered, and he wondered if he'd ever be able to see her face clearly again, if the dark would ever not feel like a threat.
"Just hold on," he said. His voice was rough, scraped thin by the way he'd been screaming. "We're going home."
She didn't answer. Her breathing was shallow, too fast, and when he pressed two fingers to her throat her pulse was there but weak, fluttering under his touch like a bird.
He took the stairs two at a time.
By the time he reached the second floor landing, his legs were burning. The weight of her, full and real, was a thing he'd almost forgotten. Three inches of her against his collarbone had been one thing. This, the whole of her, the whole of her trust in him, was another.
Lee was at the top of the stairs. His face was pale, his glasses askew, and he had a length of pipe in his hands that he lowered when he saw Roy.
"She's hurt," Roy said. "Bad. We need Sandy. We need the med room."
Lee's eyes went to Rosa's arm, to the soaked sleeve, to her white fingers. He didn't waste time asking questions. He turned and ran, his footsteps echoing up the stairwell.
Roy followed, carrying his sister, and the whole world felt like it was holding its breath.