Boneshaker

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 ru

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.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Should’ve gone down the outside!” the shouty voice accused.

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled, relieved to hear the other person even though she didn’t know if he pla

She said, louder, “Get me out of here!”

“Get away from the door!”

Having learned her lesson about responding fast, she sidestepped her way around the hotel’s front desk. A new and catastrophic crash bowed the front door inward, but didn’t break it. A second assault cracked the thing’s hinges, and a third took it clear off the frame.

An enormous man hurtled through it, then dragged himself to a stop.

“You—” He pointed and stopped himself midthought. “Are a woman.”

“Very good,” Briar said, wobbling out from behind the desk.

“All right. Come with me, and do it fast. We haven’t got a minute before they start reviving.”

The man with the ti

He wasn’t fat at all, but he was nearly as wide as the doorway — though the effect was enhanced by his armor. His shoulders were plated with steel, and a high, round collar rose up behind his neck to meet the helmet. Where his elbows and wrists bent, makeshift chain mail functioned as joints. Across his torso, thick leather straps held the whole thing taut and close.

It was as if someone had taken a suit of armor and made it into a jacket.

“Lady, we haven’t got all night,” he told her.

She began to say that it wasn’t night, yet, but she was winded and worried, and irrationally glad for the company of this heavily armed man. “I’m coming,” she said. She stumbled and knocked against his arm, then righted herself.

He didn’t grab her to help, but he didn’t push her away, either. He only turned around and headed back out the door.

She followed. “What was that thing?” she asked.

“Questions later. Watch your step.”

The street and walkways were littered with the tangled, twitching, growling bodies of rotters. Briar’s first steps took trouble to avoid them, but her escort was outpacing her, so she abandoned the approach and moved from corpse to corpse without regard for where her feet might land. Her boots broke arms and stomped through ribcages. Her heel landed too close against a dead woman’s face and scraped down her skull, dragging a sheet of flaky skin with it and leaving the flesh wiped upon the stones.

“Wait,” she begged.

“No waiting. Look at them,” he said, as he too disregarded the quivering rotters.

Briar thought it was a ridiculous instruction. She couldn’t help but look at them; they were everywhere — underfoot and down the road, flattened against curbs and leaning against bricks with their tongues lolling and their eyes fluttering.

But she thought she understood the armored man’s meaning. Animation was returning to their limbs. Their jerking hands moved harder, and with more deliberation. Their kicking feet were twisting and turning, trying to work themselves up to a standing position. Every second that passed, they gathered their wits — such as they were — or at least gathered their intuitive sense of motion.

“This way. Faster.”

“I’m trying!”

“That’s not good enough.” He threw back a hand and seized her wrist. He yanked her forward, lifting her as lightly as a toddler over another stack of restless, prone rotters.

One of the gruesome things held up a hand and tried to grab Briar’s ankle.

She kicked at its twiggy arm but she missed, because the man in the mask shifted his grip on her wrist and pulled again, past one last clump of bodies where a rotter was sitting up and moaning, trying to rouse its brethren.

“All right, it’s a straight shot now” the man said.

“A straight shot to what?”

“To the underground. Hurry. This way.”

He indicated a stone-faced structure adorned with the mournful statues of owls. A legend across the front door declared that the place had once been a bank. The front door was nailed shut with the remains of shattered shipping crates, and the windows were covered with bars.

“How do we —?”

“Stay close. Up, then down.”

Around the side there were no helpful fire escapes with dangling ladders, but when Briar looked up she could see the underside of a rickety balcony.

The man in the steel jacket pulled an ugly hooked hammer out from his belt and tossed it up. It trailed a long hemp rope behind it, and when it snagged somewhere above, the man yanked on the rope and a set of stairs unfolded. They clanked down with all the loud, rhythmic grace of a drawbridge descending too quickly.