“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.
They jumped.
A hundred feet with only the friction of their hands and feet to slow them: they landed hard on the packed dirt. Peter and Apgar came up quickly, but Jock did not. He had sprained, perhaps broken, his ankle. Peter pulled him upright and threw the man’s arm over his shoulder.
“Christ, you’re heavy.”
They ran.
The basement was a death trap.
As Sara ran for the door, a scream volleyed behind her, sharp, like metal being cut, then the room erupted in cries. She was carrying a little girl; she had scooped her up without thinking. She would have carried more if she could; she would have carried them all.
Jenny reached the door first. People were surging behind her. Suddenly the woman couldn’t move; the weight of panicked bodies had immobilized her, pressing her against the metal. She was yelling for people to back away but could scarcely be heard. The shrieks of the children were like the highest notes of a scale, impossibly shrill.
The door burst open; a hundred people attempted to cram through at once. Blind instinct had taken hold—to flee, to survive whatever the cost. People were falling, children being trampled underfoot. Virals ricocheted around the room, flinging themselves from wall to wall, victim to victim. Their enjoyment was obscene. One was carrying a child in its mouth and shaking it like a dog with a rag. As Sara wedged through the door, a faceless woman wrenched the little girl from her arms and shoved ahead, knocking her to the floor at the base of the stairs. People were thundering past. A familiar face emerged from the chaos: Grace, holding her baby. She was huddled against the wall of the stairwell. Upstairs, guns were popping. Sara gripped the woman by the sleeve to make her look at her. Stay with me, hold my hand.