It was then—half blind, stumbling through the worst snowstorm of her life and wondering how it came up with so little warning—that Win saw the man in the window.
This was only a block from the entrance to the gym. There was an old building on a corner, with a small plaza in front of it, featuring bronze statues to commemorate . . . something. She’d never stopped to read the plaque, although she did mistake them for actual people once, in the twilight, which wasn’t at all fun.
The first and second floors of the building were an open plan with look-through glass, the kind of design that made more sense for a department store or bookstore than for what this was, which was a bank. The second floor had desks so that (she guessed) the bank could showcase their happy customers signing loan documents.
The man was on the second floor. He wasn’t signing anything; he was just looking down at her.
There were a lot of shadows going on. It looked a little like he had on a long overcoat or a cape and a little like he was wearing a mask or a helmet on his face, and Win thought maybe he had a hood.
Her first thought was that this was the angel of death here to pick up where he left off. But if that was true, the angel of death was awfully shy.
She steered Elton to the doors: There was a revolving door and a standard one for emergencies.
No way he was getting through either of them.
“Stay here,” she said to Elton. “I’ll be right back.”
Win took the bow and quiver off the saddle, then smashed the emergency door glass with the knife—she’d gotten quite good at this—and stepped inside.
“Hello?” she shouted.
The way to the second floor was up a spiral staircase to her left, or via a nonworking escalator in the center of the room. She nocked an arrow and took the staircase.
“I saw you,” she called out. “I know you’re here. Come on out.”
She got up to the second floor, reached the window, and discovered she was actively threatening a cardboard cutout of an extremely generic man in a suit who really, really very much wanted to tell her about how great the bank’s interest rates were.
She laughed and then kicked the sign over so this never happened again.
“Thanks for wasting my time,” she said.
Then, a flash of light on the other side of the window caught her eye.
Lightning again?
It wasn’t lightning, unless it was extremely localized, extremely small ball lightning. A thousand sparkles of white light rushed through the wind currents in directions contrary to where the snow was blowing. She didn’t know what was causing it, but it was beautiful.
As she watched, it aggregated into a shape that looked like it had two arms, two legs, and a head. She gasped.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” she said. “You’re my neon ghost.”
As if in response, the lights charged ahead, passing through the glass and then through her before disappearing.
“Goodness,” she said, once she felt like it was okay to start breathing again. “Buy a girl a drink first next time.”
3
Elton hadn’t run off, which was nice of him. They were back in the gym a few minutes later.
Touré was already talking.
“. . . big war, right? And these guys over here, like, there was this technology, okay, and it went, like, in the other direction from us, but to use it . . .”
“Hi,” Win said. “Who you talking to?”
He looked at her, confused. His face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot.
“Wasn’t I talking to you?” he asked.
“I just got back,” she said.
“Oh. I thought I was talking to you.”
She went about the business of putting away what she’d come in with: Elton, mainly, but also more blankets, and a dead rabbit.
She had been cooking on the roof, but that might have to change, due both to the snow and to the dropping temperatures. A fire might be the only way to keep warm, and would make perfect sense if she could figure out what to do with the smoke. Short term, if she really had to, she could lie down next to Touré and put a blanket over them. He was generating enough heat to keep her warm through the night.
Probably not enough to cook the rabbit. But when she felt his forehead, she wasn’t so sure—he felt like he was broiling to death.
Despite that, the wound actually looked a lot better. He screamed when she touched it, so it undoubtedly didn’t feel better, but it looked like his body might be healing.
She just had to bring the fever down.
“Hey,” she said.
“Present,” Touré said. He spoke like there was cotton in his mouth.
“I think you should see the roof. Would you like to see the roof?”
“Love to.”
“Great. But I can’t carry you all the way, you have to help. It’s going to suck.”
“Then we’ll stay here,” he said.
“No, we have to go to the roof.”
“Okay.”
She helped him up. He screamed as soon as his leg moved and screamed some more when trying to put weight on it, but he didn’t pass out, which was about the best she could have hoped for.
Reaching the roof meant going up another flight of stairs and then out through a maintenance door. She’d been up several times already—mostly for non-fire-related reasons—because the view was decent and she enjoyed looking at the stars. But those were good-weather trips. This time, the wind nearly took both of them off the ledge immediately.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s snowing. Merry Christmas, everyone.”
“Here, right here, sit down.”
“In the snow? Shouldn’t I have on a hat or something?”
“No, just . . . lie down. Right here.”
“Okay.”
She helped him lie down in the snow, which was already six inches deep. Then she started packing the snow around him.
“Are you burying me?” he asked.
“I’m trying to get your fever down,” she said. “I don’t have an ice bath, but I do have lots of snow. How’s it feel?”
He looked left and right, as if consulting the other Tourés on the roof with him.
“Not bad, actually,” he said. “I think my leg is going numb. My fingers, too.”
“We won’t be up here long. I don’t want to add pneumonia to your symptoms.”
“Thanks, you’re the best. We should . . . we have to tell the others.”
“The others?” she asked, needing clarification. He had, in the past thirty-six hours, addressed entire roomfuls of people that weren’t actually present. “You mean your friends in Cambridge?”
“It’s coming back for us, that’s what he told me.”
“Who? Was it Elton? Were you talking to Elton again? Because he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“Did you see the sparkly man?” he asked.
She was taken aback for a moment. He could be describing one of his many hallucinations, or he could be talking about her neon ghost.
Did he see it too?
“Yes,” she said.
“You did?”
“Yes. Did the sparkly man tell you that it’s coming back for us?” she asked. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“No, no, he doesn’t talk.”
Whether or not any of this made sense, she thought it was a good idea to keep him talking, because if he dozed off and she couldn’t wake him, she didn’t know what to do next; she couldn’t get Touré off the roof and down the stairs without his help.
All the same, it was hard to decide if he was speaking nonsense or if he’d seen what she had.
“Then who told you?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Have to warn them.”
“Your friends.”
“They’re great. I can’t wait for you to meet them. There’s Robbie and Carol and Bethany . . . Well, we don’t like Bethany, but she’s okay I gues
s . . . and Noah. He’s pretty cool.”
“Sure. I can’t wait.”
She sat down in the snow, clutching his still-too-warm hand while she was personally starting to get a chill of her own.
From where she was sitting, she could see a department store across the street. As long as the pigs were hiding from the storm, she probably had time to run over there for warmer clothes, she thought. Before the weather got much worse.
She checked Touré’s forehead again. There was no way to tell if this was working at all, but at least he seemed to feel better.
“I’ll be honest, Touré, I don’t know for sure what to do here,” she said. “I don’t think I can feed you all winter, and Elton . . . Do you know how much horses eat? Come winter, back at the ranch we had enough hay and grains stored to get the animals through when there wasn’t any grass, but now we’re in a city. He eats grass and vegetables, and all I have is protein. He’ll have what I have, but it won’t be near enough. I might have to set him free, make him find his own way.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah. And then there’s you. I don’t have the medical training to get you through this, buddy. And I don’t know if your friends would have an easier time, but I bet they would. I just have no idea how to bring you to them. It’s too far.”
“You gotta leave me,” he said. “It’s okay, I’m an NPC.”
“A what?”
“A non-player character. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you get back.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, but I gotta warn them. It’s an engine, you know? It collects tickets.”
“Sure,” she said.
He squeezed her hand tightly.
“Take the train,” he said.
“What?”
“If you wanna go to Cambridge, take the red line.”
“That’s an insane idea,” she said, liking it already.
Carol
Carol had to shout for quite a while before Bethany finally heard her.
In that time, the man on the other side of the door didn’t attempt to pull it open, which was almost worse; it could mean he exited during the three seconds Carol was on the floor prior to her getting the door closed. He could be standing in the hall, laughing at the blind woman.
By the time Bethany made it to the end of the hallway, that was exactly what Carol had convinced herself was going on.
“Is he behind me?” Carol shouted.
“Who?” Bethany asked. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
“There’s nobody else in the hallway?”
“Just you and me. What’s wrong with the door?”
“There is a man in this room. He called me by name. Are you armed with something?”
“Like what, my charm and good looks? Are you serious right now?”
“I am thoroughly serious. Go find a weapon.”
“Okay, okay.”
Bethany ran off.
Carol listened to her stomping down the staircase two steps at a time, jumping to each landing, all the way down. It was comforting, in its way, even if having Bethany fall and break her neck would make this situation that much worse.
It didn’t sound as if Bethany was intercepted on her way down. Because that was the third, and least savory, option: If he wasn’t still in the dorm room, or standing in the hall, he had to be somewhere else in the building. And if he was somewhere else in the building, he had the capacity to attack Bethany while she was making all that noise.
“She’s coming back,” Carol said, through the door. “With a weapon. And Robert’s on his way. You’d better not mess with us or this will end badly.”
It was a ridiculous bit of bravado. The only person less intimidating in this dormitory than the thirteen-year-old girl was the blind woman. Saying Robbie was the most formidable of them was saying almost nothing.
Bethany returned shortly.
“Okay,” she said. “Open the door. Let’s kick this guy’s ass.”
“What do you have?” Carol asked.
“Fireplace poker. Step aside.”
Carol let go of the doorknob and moved to the left of the door. It did not fly open.
“One, two, three,” Bethany said. Then she opened the door and jumped into the room, screaming obscenities.
Carol heard Bethany run around the room, yelling some more and swinging the poker.
It’s option number three, then, she thought.
“There’s nobody in here,” Bethany called.
Carol entered the room.
“Are you sure?” Carol asked.
“I mean, yeah, as sure as I can be. Unless he’s invisible. What’s that smell? Did you . . .”
“Did I what?”
“It just, I mean it’s okay, it smells like piss in here, so I was asking. You know, never mind.”
“That isn’t me,” Carol said. “It’s his smell.”
“Well, he’s not in here, so I don’t know what to tell you.”
“All right. Let’s wait for Robbie in the common room. Until he’s back, we go nowhere alone in this building, do you understand?”
“Geez, sure, Mom.”
“Then you don’t understand. I’ll make it clearer. There was a man in here who knew my name. If he’s not here any longer, he’s in another part of the building. Since the snow has blocked all the entrances, he was here for the storm, and may have been here with us this entire time.”
“Okay, well, now I’m not getting any sleep tonight.”
“I may never sleep again. We’ll have to find rooms we can lock from the inside.”
“Or move somewhere else.”
“Yes, or move somewhere else.”
Robbie
1
This is what’s going to get us killed, Robbie thought, as he waded through chest-deep snow. Not the big things; the stupid little things we forgot because we took them for granted.
Of particular annoyance to Robbie was that this was only a round trip of about a half mile, in total. He could have done it any other time in under an hour. With snow, it was going to take the entire day.
That was assuming he made it there at all. He was walking through snow, on top of snow. The stuff at the bottom was sufficiently compressed to support his weight, which was fine, except he had no idea how deep the drifts really were.
Occasionally he’d hit a soft patch, and then he would know. These came up without warning and dropped him another two or three feet straight down, well past where the top of the snow was over his head. The first time it happened, he panicked, which just resulted in him sinking deeper. He got out by calming down and performing a sort of sideways-and-up swim move.
It happened three more times, but once he understood the best way to extricate himself, it got easier. With each step was the fear that the next time, he’d slip so far down so fast that his legs would end up pinned until a thaw released him or a predator found him, whichever came first.
But still—it was only a quarter of a mile each way.
2
One of the other issues he failed to take into consideration was that the snow blocking the door to the dormitory would of course also block the door to the supermarket. He realized this after nearly walking past the supermarket.
“Geniuses,” he said, to nobody. “That’s what we are.”
The top of the snow met the lip of the roof. If he’d thought to bring one of the shovels he’d neglected to pick up from the hardware store, he might have been able to dig out the side door enough to open it, but he’d need about five more hours than he probably had. That was with a shovel. With just his hands? Forget it.
He pulled himself up onto the flat roof.
There should have been at least as much accumulation up on the roof as anywhere else, but for some reason there wasn’t; it was only a couple of feet deep. Robbie figured wind had to have been a factor in keeping it from really piling up there. He was grateful, anyway, because the lower snow cover meant he c
ould see the roof access door.
Between kicking around snow and scooping it up with his hands, he had the space in front of the door cleared out in just a few minutes. Then he tried opening it.
Unsurprisingly, it was locked.
“Honestly, I don’t know what I expected,” he said. “Of course it’s locked.”
He pulled on the doorknob a couple more times, just in case the door changed its mind. Then he looked around for something to hit it with, which was also not helpful, because the entire roof was under a layer of snow. There could be a loose axe lying around and he wouldn’t see it.
“That’s what I need. An axe.”
Getting one meant going all the way back to the dorm, coming back again, chopping open a door that looked like it was made of metal anyway, getting the Noot, and going back. All before dark. Based on the sun—he deeply missed being able to know what time it was still, but had become accustomed to estimating how much day he had left using the sun’s position—he didn’t have enough time to do all of that.
But they had to eat. If he waited a day, he might not have the energy necessary to accomplish this trip a second time, so he probably had no choice but to do this today. If not, the other realistic option was to hope the snow melted very soon . . . and that no other storm came along to replenish it.
Robbie was thinking about all of this when he heard a click from the door. Puzzled, he turned and stared at it for a few seconds.
“Did you just unlock yourself?” he asked.
Robbie tried the door again. This time, the knob turned and he was able to pull it open.
Okay, so either my pulling on it jarred something loose in the lock, or someone unlocked it from the inside, he thought.
“Hello?” he shouted, into the void on the other side of the doorway.
It could be Touré.
Touré could have made it back as far as the store and gotten stuck here. Or he was injured and couldn’t make it any further. They hadn’t returned to the market since Touré disappeared—clearly, since they’d run out of food in the interim. So it could be him.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 19