Clickk...
The handle moved again at 00:17.
Xavier was already at the door.
He had not been asleep — had not tried to be, not after the gunshots, not after the horde had gathered outside the building following the sound of them and then dispersed and then regathered around midnight as though the building itself had become a point of interest that they kept returning to. He had been sitting against the wall opposite the barricade with his blade across his knees, watching, and when the handle moved he was standing before the motion completed.
The barricade held.
He put his eye to the peephole.
The corridor was — full.
Not the three walkers from before. Not the occasional drifter from the stairwell. The gunshots had drawn something and the something had redistributed through the building and what had redistributed to this floor was currently standing in the corridor with the specific patient density of a crowd that had nowhere to be and nothing to do except exist in proximity to whatever had pulled it here.
He could see the nearest one clearly through the peephole — a woman, close enough that he could see the texture of her skin in the corridor's amber emergency light, the grey-pallor, the wide-fixed eyes, her hands moving against the wall beside his door with the searching motion he had come to recognize as *looking for purchase, looking for the thing to push.*
She was looking at his door.
Not specifically. Not at him. But the door was the surface and the surface was in front of her and her hands were on it.
Another one came into his peephole's field of view. Then another.
He stepped back.
He went to Nana.
She was at the window — had been at the window since the gunshots, alternating between the keyhole and the glass in the specific systematic way she monitored things, the pattern of someone who needed the information and had organized how to gather it. She was standing to the side of the curtain's edge, not in front of it, looking at the angle of the street below.
He touched her shoulder.
She turned.
He held up four fingers. Pointed at the door.
She looked at the door. She looked back at him. She held up both hands — more.
He nodded. More.
Her jaw tightened. She looked at the window. Looked at him. Held up one finger — *wait* — and moved to the keyhole herself, slowly, putting her eye to it.
She looked for ten seconds.
She stepped back.
She pressed both hands flat against her sternum, the gesture he had come to understand as her body's way of managing something large — the physical containment of it, the hands pressing in to keep the thing from expanding outward.
He moved to her.
"Breathing," he said, very quiet. Just the word.
She breathed.
"They don't know we're here," he said. Same register, barely sound. "They're drawn by the noise. By the shots. They're ranging through the building. If we're quiet —"
"There are so many," she whispered.
"I know."
"Xavier, the corridor is —"
"I know." He held her gaze. "We stay quiet. We don't move the barricade. We wait."
She looked at the door.
shhk ....Drag....shhhk...
The sounds from the corridor were audible now — not loud, not the dramatic pounding of films, just the collective ambient sound of a large number of moving bodies in an enclosed space. The shuffling. The low grinding sound that rose and fell with no pattern. The occasional soft impact against the door that was not a knock and not a push but just the random contact of something large passing close.
She sat down on the floor.
He sat beside her, his back to the wall between the door and the window, his blade in his right hand, and they waited.
They waited for two hours and fourteen minutes.
He counted.
Not continuously — he had other things to hold in his head simultaneously, the sound monitoring, the barricade assessment, the blade position, Nana beside him whose breathing he could track without looking at her because he had learned it over four days in this apartment, the exact rhythm of it in different states. She was managing. She was scared and she was managing it, the same way she managed everything — by staying present in the specific immediate moment and not letting the full scale of the thing sit in her chest all at once.
At 02:31, the corridor sounds began to move.
Not away — downward. The footsteps shifting from the floor-level shuffle to the stairwell-level shuffle, the sound migrating down through the building the way sound migrated through buildings, following the path of least resistance. Something on a lower floor had drawn them — a sound, a light, something — and they went toward it with the patient mindlessness of things that had only the direction of their hunger.
By 02:44, the corridor outside was quiet.
He checked the peephole again.
Empty.
He stepped back and exhaled — not dramatically, just the breath he had been holding at a specific controlled level for two hours and fourteen minutes releasing to something more ordinary.
Nana looked up at him from the floor.
"Gone?" she mouthed.
"For now," he said. Still quiet. Still careful.
She put her face in her hands.
Not crying — just the gesture of someone allowing themselves thirty seconds of not-managing, not-watching, not-holding. He stood and let her have it.
Then she looked up.
"Okay," she said. "We need a plan."
The pack came first.
This was how Xavier thought — problem, then solution, broken into the smallest actionable components. The immediate problem was that the corridor was temporarily clear and they needed to use the clear time for something rather than waiting for it to fill again.
He went to the closet.
His field pack was there — the one he used for extended missions, the frame pack with the load-bearing structure that could carry forty kilos if needed. He had not unpacked it. He had been sleeping in this apartment for four days on a packing list he had not finished because the circumstances had changed before he reached the door.
He pulled it out.
He began to select.
The methodology of packing for a situation like this was not complicated in principle and was complicated in practice because practice meant deciding what you were willing to die without and what you needed to live, and those were not always the same list.
The smaller blade first — the secondary, the one that fit the sheath at his hip, which was different from the main blade in length and weight and better suited to close quarters. He had used the main blade in the corridor and he would keep the main blade accessible but the secondary needed to be on his person.
His gun. Ammunition, all of it — five magazines, the count he had maintained since the outbreak started with the consciousness of someone who knew that counting and maintaining was the difference between a gun being useful and a gun being metal.
Water, as much as the pack could hold without compromising movement.
Food — the dense kind, the highest caloric yield per gram he could identify from what they had, the field-nutrition logic he had been trained in.
Medical: the antiseptic, the bandages, the fever medication. The pain management.
He set aside what he was packing for himself and began a second pile.
Nana was watching him.
"What are you —" she started.
"Yours," he said, tilting his head at the second pile.
She looked at it.
"My bag is on the train," she said.
"I know." He moved to the secondary closet — the one he hadn't opened in front of her, the storage closet with the gear he kept for extended field deployments. He found the smaller pack, the day-pack, the one rated for light load.
He brought it to her.
She looked at it. At him.
"The secondary blade," he said. "For you."
She looked at the blade.
"I know you train with guns," he said. "I know that's your primary. But the corridor —" he didn't finish. She understood the corridor. She had been at the peephole. "Sound draws them. The blade doesn't draw them."
"I know," she said.
She reached out and took the blade. She held it — turned it, tested the weight, the balance, the way she tested everything that needed to be used rather than just held. He watched her hands on it.
"It's good," she said.
"It's field rated," he said. "Single edge, reinforced spine. If you're close enough to need it —"
"I've trained with blades," she said. "Not extensively, but." She met his eyes. "I'll learn the rest from watching you."
He looked at her.
"You already have," he said. "You learn by watching faster than anyone I've trained with."
She blinked.
She looked back at the blade.
"That's the first time you've said something like that," she said.
"I say things when they're accurate," he said. "Not before."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you," she said.
"Pack the bag," he said.
She packed the bag.
The rope came from the curtains.
He had been thinking about the window since yesterday — since he had opened it and looked down and closed it again because the street was wrong for it. The street was still wrong. But the street was the ground floor problem, and before the ground floor problem was the corridor problem, and the corridor problem had a possible solution that he had been working out in the geometry of the building's exterior while Nana filled water containers and watched windows.
The corridor was full.
The window was fourteen floors up.
But the building had a ledge — he had checked this — running along the building's exterior at the fourteenth floor level, a structural feature that was not decorative and was not meant to be walked and that he was going to walk anyway. The ledge was thirty centimeters wide. The building's exterior ran east. Three windows along the exterior, the building had a service access point — a maintenance panel that connected to the service stairwell, which bypassed the main stairwell entirely.
The service stairwell was not where the horde had gone.
He had been holding this as a contingency. Now he was converting it to a plan.
Rrripp—
He took the curtains down.
Nana watched him strip them from the rail with the focused attention she brought to things she was learning. He laid them flat, found the scissors from the kitchen drawer, began to cut them into strips.
Snip.....Snipp...
"Window exit?" she said.
"Exterior ledge to the service access panel," he said. "Three windows east. The ledge is thirty centimeters."
"That's —" she started.
"Enough," he said. "With the rope for anchor. I go first, I secure, you follow."
She looked at the window.
"What about the street?" she said.
"The street is the second problem," he said. "The first problem is the corridor. The exterior solves the corridor problem regardless of what the street looks like." He kept cutting. "If the street is impassable we find a way down through the service stairwell at a better time. If it's passable —"
"We run," she said.
"We run," he agreed.
She crossed to him. She sat on the floor beside him and picked up the other curtain panel and started cutting her own strips. He looked at her, at the efficient way her hands moved.
"Hold it tighter at the cut edge," he said. "The fabric pulls."
She adjusted. "Better?"
"Better," he said.
They cut strips together in the near-dark, and the sounds from outside were the sounds they had become, and the plan took shape between them in the specific way plans took shape between two people who had been thinking in compatible directions.
She heard it before she saw it.
WHUMP—WHUMP—WHUMP—
The distinctive sound — rotors, the specific frequency of the military model, different from the commercial helicopters she was used to hearing — coming from the northeast, getting louder. She was at the window already, at the curtain's edge, and she looked.
The helicopter came in low over the mid-district and banked toward the building across the street — the one with the ninth-floor light, the one she had been watching for three days. It came down on the rooftop, the landing lights flooding the building's upper floors, and the sound of it pulled the horde at the street level immediately, heads turning, the collective attention shifting.
From the helicopter, a loudspeaker.
She could hear the words through the glass.
"—evacuation corridor established at central plaza. All survivors: central plaza, sector seven. SKYHAVEN evacuation flights operating. Repeat: central plaza, sector seven —"
She turned.
"Xavier."
He was already at the window beside her.
They looked at each other.
Central plaza.
She had been to the central plaza a hundred times — the claw machine arcade, the fountain, the bench where they ate buns and held hands and watched pigeons. Three kilometers from here. Three kilometers through streets that had not been passable yesterday.
She looked at the streets now.
The helicopter's presence had drawn the horde — was drawing it, pulling the density away from the residential blocks and toward the sound of the rotors, the lights. And in the spaces the horde had vacated —
People.
She could see them emerging from buildings — from doorways, from ground floors, the specific tentative movement of people who had been inside for days and were now reading the situation the way she was reading it from above. Some with bags. Some with weapons. Some in groups and some alone.
Moving toward the plaza.
Some of them were running.
Some of them — the helicopter was covering some of them, the loudspeaker keeping the horde's attention — made it half a block, a full block, two blocks —
Some of them didn't.
She watched.
She pressed her fist to her mouth and watched people make their calculations and run and some of them made it and some of them didn't and she watched because she needed to know, because this information was what the decision was made of.
Xavier watched beside her. Silent. Running the same calculation she was.
"The helicopter is covering the approach," she said. "If the horde is pulled toward the sound —"
"The window of approach is narrow," he said. "And it changes if the helicopter moves."
"But it exists," she said.
He looked at the street. At the people moving through it.
"It exists," he said.
She turned from the window.
She sat down on the bed.
She picked up her phone.
No signal still — had been no signal since day two, the network crushed under the weight of everyone trying to reach everyone. But she opened the message application anyway. She opened the thread with Caleb — the last message from her, 07:58 on the morning the world ended, *gege!! library day!! xavier says hi (he didn't say hi but he would if i asked him) 📚.*
She stared at it.
She started typing.
"Gege—"
She stopped. Started again.
"We're okay. Xavier and I. We're in his apartment — mid-district, sector 14, building C. We're okay." She paused. "We heard the evacuation announcement. Central plaza. We're going to try to get there." Another pause.
She thought about what she wanted to say. About all the things she had been holding since the airport, since the door of his transport closed, since the seventeen days of calls and the three weeks before that and the whole geometry of missing him that she had been building structures around.
She thought about her parents.
She thought about apartment 4-12.
She pressed the thing down.
"I'll see you there. I have to believe that so I'm going to believe that. I love you Gege. Please be okay."
She hit send.
The message sat with the sending indicator — the spinning circle, the attempt — and then it did the thing it had not done for three days.
Tick....
Tick....
It went through.
One tick. Two ticks. The small check marks of a delivered message, sitting under her words.
She stared at them.
Her eyes filled.
Not the grief-crying, not the fear-crying. Something else — the specific overflow of a feeling that had been building pressure for three days and had found a small release valve, the two small check marks that meant the network had cleared enough for one message to get through to wherever he was.
He would see it.
Maybe not now. Maybe he was operational, in the field, not looking at his phone. But he would see it.
She put the phone down.
She pressed the back of her hand to her eyes.
Xavier was still at the window. He turned when she didn't say anything for long enough.
He saw her face.
He crossed to her.
He sat beside her on the bed.
"It went through," she said. "The message. To Caleb. It went through."
He was quiet.
"He'll know where we're going," she said. "He'll know to look for us at the plaza." She breathed. "If he reads it, he'll know."
"He'll read it," Xavier said.
"You don't know that —"
"He came down from SKYHAVEN," Xavier said. "He is somewhere in this city right now. A message from you will be the first thing he checks." He held her gaze. "He'll read it."
She looked at him.
She leaned her head on his shoulder.
He stayed still.
Outside, the helicopter continued its circuit, and the loudspeaker continued its announcement, and in the street below people made their calculations and ran, and some of them made it toward the plaza and some of them didn't, and the city's terrible arithmetic continued its count.
"Tomorrow?" she said.
He looked at the window. At the street. At the rope of curtain strips on the floor, knotted and tested, ready.
"Tomorrow we see what the approach looks like in daylight," he said. "We assess. We plan the route." He paused. "And then we go."
She nodded.
She stayed where she was, her head on his shoulder, the pink bunny on the nightstand and the packed bags on the floor and the rope coiled by the window.
"Xavier," she said.
"Yes."
"We're going to make it."
Not a question. Not this time.
He looked at the window.
"Yes," he said.
Outside, the city burned and moved and screamed. Inside the apartment on the fourteenth floor, two people sat in the dark with their bags packed and their blades at hand and a message sent into the city toward the person who would come for them.
The two check marks sat under her words.
He would read it.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.