They arrived in a hallway with walls of sweating stone. A ladder took them deeper underground, a second deeper still. A dense humanity lay near. They were coming closer. They were homing in.
They reached a metal door with a heavy ring. The first viral, the alpha, opened the door and slid inside, the others following.
The room was ripe with the odor of men. A row of lockers, a bench, a table bearing the remains of a hastily abandoned meal. Connected to a complex assembly of pipes and gears was a panel with six steel wheels the size of manhole covers.
Yes, said Zero. Those.
The alpha gripped the first wheel. INLET NO. 1 it was marked.
Turn it.
Six wheels. Six tubes.
Eight hundred dying cries.
—
Pistol extended, Sara approached the storage room and gently dislodged the door with her foot.
“Maybe it was just mice,” Jenny whispered.
The scratching sounded again. It was coming from behind a stack of crates. Sara placed the lantern on the floor and pushed the pistol out with both hands. The crates were piled four high. One on the bottom began to move, jostling those above it.
“Sara—”
The crates went tumbling. Sara fell back as the viral burst through the floor, twisting in midair to attach itself to the ceiling like a roach. She fired the pistol blindly. The viral seemed not to care at all about the gun or else knew that Sara was too startled to aim. The pistol’s slide locked back; the magazine was spent. Sara turned, shoved Jenny from the room, and began to run.
—
At the base of the wall, Alicia, immobilized, broken, lay alone. Her breathing was labored and damp, punctuated by small, exquisitely painful hitches. Blood was in her mouth. Her vision seemed skewed; images refused to resolve. She had no sense of time at all. She might have been shot thirty seconds ago. It might have been an hour.
A dark shape materialized above her: Soldier, bowing his head to hers. Oh, see what you’ve done to yourself, he said. I leave you for a minute and look what happens. His warm breath kissed her face; he dipped closer, nuzzling her, exhaling softly through his nostrils.
My good boy. She raised one bloody hand to his cheek. My great, my magnificent Soldier, I am sorry.
“Sister, what have they done to you?”
Amy was kneeling beside her. The woman’s shoulders shook with a sob; she buried her face in her hands. “Oh no,” she moaned. “Oh no.”
The spotlights had gone out. Alicia heard gunshots and cries, but these were distant, dimming. A merciful darkness enveloped her. Amy was holding her hand. It seemed that all that had gone before was a journey, that the road had brought her here and ended. The night slid into silence. She felt suddenly cold. She drifted away.
Wait.
Her eyes flew open. A breeze was pushing over her—dense, gritty—and with it a rumble, like thunder, though the sound did not stop. It rolled and rolled, its volume accumulating, the air swirling with windblown matter. The ground beneath them began to shake; with a whinny, Soldier reared up, his hooves slashing the air.
Her army is nothing. I can whisk it away.
Alicia raised her head just in time to see them coming.
—
Peter, Apgar, and Jock were racing down the falling catwalk. Its failure proceeded in sections, like dominoes falling in a line. Peter’s orders to fall back to the orphanage, the city’s last line of defense, went unheeded; a state of panic reigned. The problem was not merely the serial collapse of the catwalk, from which soldiers were falling a hundred feet to their deaths. The virals had also stormed its length. Some men were hurled, others devoured, twitching and screaming as the virals’ jaws sank home. Yet a third group were bitten and subsequently left to their own devices. As had been witnessed in the townships, Fanning’s virus did its work with unprecedented swiftness; in short order, a growing percentage of Kerrville’s defenders were turning on their former comrades.
A hundred yards downstream from the vanished command post, Peter, Apgar, and Jock found themselves boxed in. Behind them, the catwalk’s failure continued, span by span; ahead, the virals were coming toward them. No flight of stairs lay within reach.
“Oh, hell,” said Apgar. “I always hated doing this.”
They unfurled the ropes over the side. Jock was no fan of heights, either; the incident on the mission roof had scarred him for life. Yet it was also true that in the last twenty-four hours a change had occurred. He had always believed himself to be a flimsy man, a chip in the current of life. But since the birth of his son, and the burst of love this had produced, he had discovered within himself a solidity of character he had never thought possible, an expanding sense of life’s importance and his place within its web. He wanted to be a man of whom it could be said that he had put others before himself and died in their defense. Thus the newly inducted and personally transformed Private Jock Alvado shoved his terror aside, stepped over the rail, and turned his back on the maw of space below him; Peter and Apgar did the same.