Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Zero
The city is burning. Not metaphorically.
This shit is beyond real. More real than I ever thought possible.
I’ve pinched myself at least a dozen times as if it will somehow wake me up from all of this.
Actual fire, actual smoke, actual columns of black rising from actual wreckage in a way that makes the word disaster feel like it was invented specifically for this view.
I stand in it for approximately two seconds before Colt pulls me forward, and then we’re moving again, trying not to die on terrain that has strong opinions about bare feet. The smoke has layers to it.
The bottom layer is chemical, plastics, and synthetics, and things that were never meant to burn.
The middle layer is older, the smell of things that have been burning for long enough to move past acrid into something almost ambient.
The top layer is just particulate, the city in suspension, everything that was solid now distributed through the air at varying altitudes.
I inhale all of it and file the complaints under later problems.
"Congratulations, Zero," I mutter to the part of myself that required three years of captivity and an active apocalypse to get outside.
"Excellent timing on the escape. Really nailed the window."
Colt doesn't glance down. His attention is fully distributed across the street ahead, scanning rubble and movement.
The spaces between structures with the systematic efficiency I've been observing since the facility.
He reads environments the way I do. We are, it occurs to me, doing the same thing from different training bases.
My bare feet have developed a working protocol. Small steps on uncertain surfaces. Weight is distributed before committing. The constant low-level read of what the ground is communicating upward. It's slower than running, marginally faster than the alternative of being unable to walk at all.
His grip on my wrist is warm and constant. It's going fine.
"Stop whining," he says.
"I wasn't," I say, "I was narrating."
"Quietly."
"I was narrating quietly."
He moves us around a section of overturned vehicles. Three of them, distributed across the street in a pattern that suggests they were moving when whatever stopped them stopped them. The doors on two are open. The third is upside down.
Nobody in any of them. Which could mean they evacuated, or it could mean something else. The silence of the open doors says something permanent happened. I stop myself from going down that line of thought. Nothing good could possibly come from it.
The roar comes from two blocks north, rolling toward us through the haze and bouncing off the angles of damaged buildings in a way that makes direction estimation unreliable. Not close enough to be immediate. Close enough to update the timeline, as well as cause my stomach to clench with worry.
I freeze for a half-step.
"Don't stop," Colt says.
"I wasn't stopping. I was recalibrating."
"Keep recalibrating while moving."
Fair.
I move.
The street changes character at the next block.
Less vehicle wreckage, more structural collapse.
A building has offered a significant portion of itself to the pavement, which has accepted the donation and cracked under the weight.
The rubble creates a landscape of its own, irregular and chaotic, with the occasional piece of furniture or personal item visible in the debris like punctuation in a sentence that stopped mid-word.
A shoe. One shoe, sitting upright on a chunk of concrete, its partner absent. I look at it as we pass and feel something I don't have time to name.
"Left or through," I ask, assessing the blockage.
"Through is faster."
"Through has bad footing on the far side. See the way the slab is angled? It'll shed weight when we step on it." He looks. A pause of about two seconds, which is how long it takes him to verify what I've already calculated.
"Left then," he says.
We go left.
"You're welcome," I say. Something that might be a sound escapes him. Very small. Gone immediately.
The left route adds a block, but the footing is workable.
Cracked but flat, the debris is smaller and more navigable.
We move faster. His stride opens up, and I match it, and for thirty seconds we're just moving through a ruined city in a rhythm that almost feels like we've been doing this longer than twenty minutes.
Then the ground shakes. Not an explosion. Not the sharp concussive punch of something detonating. Something heavier and more continuous, like a weight distribution problem being solved in real time somewhere close by.
Colt's arm sweeps across my path, and we both stop.
Ahead, a burning section of the upper floor releases from the building above it and descends in a slow, committed arc across the street.
It hits with a sound that bypasses my ears and registers directly in my chest. A wave of heat follows, and the air pressure of something large moving fast.
Exactly where we would have been. Exactly where we were, thirty seconds ago, before going left. The silence after it has a texture.
I look at the burning beam now blocking the street.
"Okay," I say.
"Yeah," he says.
We stand there for approximately two seconds, both of us doing our own private version of processing that.
Then he pulls me sideways, and we find a route around it through a gap between two collapsed sections, single-file, his hand on my shoulder now instead of my wrist, guiding without gripping.
I note the difference in precision as I’ve been tracking the evolution of how he touches me since this whole thing started.
The gap opens into what was a courtyard. Enclosed on three sides by buildings in varying states of structural commitment. The fourth side is open to the next street, providing the kind of sightline that enables decision-making.
Colt stops.
I stop.
We both scan.
The courtyard has been used recently, by the evidence of it.
Cleared paths through the debris, certain sections of cover positioned in ways that don't happen naturally.
Someone made decisions in this space about how to move through it safely.
Whether that someone is still nearby is the relevant question.
"This place hasn’t been empty long," I murmur.
"No," he says with a shake of his head.
"Survivors or something else?"
He does a careful read of the far entrance.
"Survivors arrange spaces differently than…" He pauses, "the other kind."
"The other kind being whatever made those marks in the facility walls," I observe quietly.
"Among other things," He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, "yes."
I add, among other things, to my list of things to get more information about when we're not actively navigating multiple simultaneous threats. The roar again. This time it's not directionally unclear.
South. Close enough that the sound has weight. Colt moves immediately, pulling me down and forward simultaneously, behind a section of steel beam that's lodged at an angle against what remains of a load-bearing wall.
The position puts his back against the beam and his chest against my back and his arm around my waist and his chin approximately level with the top of my head.
His scent is at a concentration level that my nervous system has escalated to a five-alarm situation.
His heartbeat is against my spine. Fast and controlled.
I focus on that. The steadiness of it. My own heart is doing something more complicated. The creatures move into the far end of the courtyard.
There are three of them. I look at them the way I looked at the claw marks. They move on two legs, but the gait is wrong, the weight distribution forward in a way that suggests the spine has been modified or the center of gravity has shifted.
They’re larger than humans in every dimension. The eyes catch the firelight from the burning street behind us and reflect it back in a way that eyes aren't supposed to. Someone engineered those. I am not entirely surprised. I am significantly unsettled, however.
Colt's arm tightens around my waist, and I feel him check his rifle. A single small motion, confirming without committing.
"Three," I breathe.
"I know."
"The one on the left is favoring its right side. Injured or compensating."
A pause.
"Can you stop doing that," he asks, very quietly.
"Doing what?"
"The assessment thing. While I'm trying to think."
"It's helpful."
"It's distracting."
"How is accurate tactical information-"
"Because you're very close to me and you keep talking," he says, quieter than before, low enough that it's only for me. His warm breath caresses the shell of my ear, causing me to shiver. I bite down on the inside of my cheek, but it doesn’t help the situation I find myself in.
The sentence lands with a specificity that has nothing to do with the threat assessment and everything to do with the six inches of space between his mouth and my ear. I snap my mouth shut.
The creatures cross the courtyard. Not hurrying. Not hunting with focus… they’re searching, which is a different behavior pattern with different implications. They haven't identified us specifically. They're sweeping the area.
I press back very slightly against the beam. His arm doesn't move. The three shapes move through the far side of the courtyard and continue into the next block, unhurried, and the sound of them fades into the ambient roar of the burning city.
Silence.
Then Colt exhales, and his arm releases from my waist, and he straightens. We return to being two separate people standing near each other instead of whatever the arrangement of the last thirty seconds was. I turn to face him.
He's already checking the courtyard. He doesn't look at me while he does it.
"The one on the left was definitely injured," I say. The corner of his mouth moves.
"Come on," he says.