He counted to himself. He saw his wife’s smiling face in each shadow. Each number, each step, one foot, the other, brought him closer to the moving thing at the end of the hallway. It was one of them, he was sure, the half-dead ghouls made by fever and disease, forced to fester in the ghetto by the barricades, the police, and the soldiers with rifles outside. He loathed the Grey Men, but could he kill one if he had to? They had been his neighbors before the fever, his fellow inmates in the tenement, and some of them factory fodder like him. Why was Lilian spared the disease, only to die in childbirth and become food for these awful things? Why had it spared him—no, not spared. He felt the stirrings in his joints over the past week; he woke in the night with silent burning in his bones. He wasn’t spared the fever, only delayed… His sentence only postponed.
The thing turned toward Tommy. Its yellow eyes almost glowed in the dim corridor, black veins cracking across the moony surface. Tommy was only twenty feet away from the Grey Man when it tilted its head to one side. Its vertebrae snapped with a soft, wet pop. It opened its mouth, a black hole above its throat. A noise leaked out.
Tommy stopped. A shiver worked through his skin. His shoulders lurched slightly. He could hear the slow scraping crawl, the owners of those damp, boney fingers pulling slowly across the boards to grab at him again. The door to the stairwell behind him clicked shut, and an echo worked its course down the hall. Something—more of them—had followed him down the stairs. Tommy was pressed on both sides.
“Pardon, sir,” Tommy said, finding his voice small but patient in his throat. He shielded the child from the Grey Man’s vision. “Pardon, but may I pass?”
The thing lowered its ruined face. A black tongue crossed sour teeth. “I smell blood.”
Behind Tommy, thudding feet crossed through the waste in the corridor.
“Pardon,” he said again, his voice shrinking. His free hand found the midwife’s shears in his waistband.
A gnarled finger, like a grey twig, poked toward the bundle under Tommy’s arm. “Whatcha got?”
The thudding feet drew closer. More sounds echoed through the hall: A grunt, the heavy sound of a boot meeting soft flesh, a curse. The other Grey Men were slowed by the near-dead refuse in the passageway.
Tommy drew the shears from his pants and jammed the point into the leering guard’s neck in one steady, swift arc. The Grey Man grabbed at silver handles, but stumbled into the wall at its left, black blood coursing from its throat. Tommy sped away into the stairwell, fleeing the dying groans of one monster and the angry howls of its brothers.
The second stairwell smelled as badly as the first, but the air felt cooler after his ordeal in the hallway. He clomped down the stairs, two at a time, cradling the infant with both arms now. A few windows were left unboarded at this end of the building, and trickles of thin moonlight cast the stairs in a silver haze. Sounds chased him: a heavy crash against the door and slobbered, angry voices as his pursuers struggled to lug the body away—a lucky break.
Tommy hesitated at the bottom. Through the open archway, he could see dim shapes moving in front of a large fire; flickers of orange and yellow light cast grotesque mockeries of humanity against the far wall. The only exit was thirty yards away.
Something black turned slowly on a spit above the fire.
Tommy would have to navigate through a throng of the monsters to make it to the exit.
He’d made this journey only an hour before, walked past the looming mob to fetch water from the well in the street. But that was before Lilian’s death. That was before the squirming thing under his arm was born. It was before he ran from those things, before he killed one with the shears only two floors above. Now, they would surely smell the blood on him. They would hold him long enough for their grim brothers to join the crowd and his flight would be in vain.
Slowly, one foot in front of the other, he stepped through the archway and began the long march to the door. The first floor had been a place of commerce not long ago, a closed market where the factory workers and new immigrants would come to trade and barter, a place of celebrations and dancing on Saturday nights. Now, the wide space held a great cooking fire and charred bones of previous meals. Since the quarantine, since the new scarcity of food, the fevered ones gave up long-held taboos.
Meat was meat.
Tommy’s eyes began to water, an effect of the smoke-haze but also the realization that Lilian’s corpse would soon fuel their bellies. He forced his gaze forward toward the exit. One foot in front of the other, he moved closer. Ten yards now, close enough to run, and Tommy’s heart vibrated a tremolo against his ribs. Loud barks echoed behind him. His pursuers had made the first floor. In his peripheral vision, Tommy could see the Grey Men lurching to their feet. Ruined hands stretched out.
With five yards remaining, Tommy ran. He bolted for the door with snarls and curses licking at his heels. His lungs erupted in fire, and he nearly staggered to the ground with coughing, but he slipped from the poisoned air into the blue night just ahead of the closest ghouls. He didn’t stop, but burst across the courtyard into the heavy shadows beyond, stumbling over bits of debris on the way.
The fever had taken some of Tommy’s strength, and his flight had burned deeper than it would have two months ago. He crouched in the shadows, panting for breath. The Grey Men stopped pursuit. Why? Tommy swung his dizzy head to one side, away to the barricades.
The soldiers’ silhouettes lowered their rifles: Tommy’s last obstacle, and then the convent, sanctuary for his babe. With the sweat cooling on his brow, he looked down at the infant. I’ll call her Lilian, if I have the chance, after her mother. His stomach tightened. He only had a few moldy potatoes and some stale bread to eat over the past week. When he ran from the building, the smell—the awful smell of blackened flesh—had tickled his appetite.
God no. It’s the fever, is all. I’m sick.
Tommy slid along the brick wall. He checked each door and window and found all of them locked. The barricade was the only passage out of the quarantine. The arm in which he’d carried baby Lilian grew numb. How could an infant be so heavy?
He glanced at the Distillery, the polluted hive. He’d escaped, hadn’t he? But the Grey Men wouldn’t give up, not yet. They were only regrouping and would intensify the search, slink around in the shadows until their awful hands found him. After all, he killed one of them. He had to move. Tommy knelt and grasped a hunk of wood from the scattered debris on the street; with one tremendous, aching effort, he tossed it against the barricade as far from the shadows as he could. The silhouette soldiers snapped to the sound, and Tommy ran.
God, he ran. He ran as if to distance the hunger from his body. He pushed his worn shoes into the gritty pavement and leapt over a shallow dip in the barricade. The toe of the trailing foot just cleared the makeshift hurdle, and Tommy staggered on the other side.
Sanctuary.
“Patterson, your station!” came a shout to his left.
The hot metal ball ripped through Tommy’s body and dragged him to the ground just as the rifle crack snapped to his ear. His chest bloomed midnight crimson, but he was able cushion the baby, twisting as he fell. The blood in his throat was warm and metallic, and the world began to bleed with black ink. Two pairs of boots, military style with blue, woolen trouser legs pulled over the tops, approached.
“Good shot, Patterson.”
“God, is that a baby?”
Take her… She’s healthy. Wet gurgles squeezed from Tommy’s mouth instead of words.
“Goddamn thing is probably sick, too. Tainted.” A pause. “Either leave it here for the meat wagon, or toss it back over the barricade. Let her own kind deal with her.”