[ NARRATOR ]
They ran.
Not the careful measured movement they had been using since leaving SGH, this was actual running, the kind that doesn't ask permission from recovering legs or healing wounds or bodies that had spent five months horizontal. The kind the body produces when the alternative is being caught.
Behind them the infected that had been heading toward the train collision sound had registered Damian's residual nanotech signal as they passed within range. Not all of them. But enough. Twenty roughly, pulling away from the collision site and reorienting, that horrible purposeful momentum building as they locked onto something closer and more present than a sound already fading.
Theo-3 ran beside Damian and watched him without appearing to watch him.
The left leg. It had been compensating since Redhill station, the gait slightly uneven, the right side taking more weight than it should. Manageable when walking. Increasingly visible when running. Theo-3 ran the numbers on sustainable pace versus infected closing speed and filed the result under things to address urgently.
They passed Bukit Merah Secondary School on their left. The school gates were closed, the buildings beyond them quiet and dark, the running track visible through the fence overgrown at the edges. A potential shelter. Noted and set aside because Damian was running toward the flare direction and Theo-3 had assessed the decision and agreed with it.
Then Theo-3 looked back.
Thirty. Approximately. The original twenty had been joined by others drawn from the surrounding residential blocks by the combination of the collision sound and Damian's signal, the two stimuli creating a convergence that was pulling infected from a wider area than either alone would have managed.
Thirty and increasing.
Theo-3 looked forward.
The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau headquarters building was on their right. Solid, fenced, multiple floors, designed with security in mind. The perimeter had a low concrete wall at hip height topped with a metal fence. Thick gauge. The kind that said keep out rather than the kind that said we are serious about keeping you out.
Theo-3 made the calculation in 0.4 seconds.
"Damian," he said.
Damian was already breathing harder than Theo-3 wanted him to be. "I see it."
"If we continue toward the flare signal we bring thirty infected to whatever situation exists there. We do not know what that situation is."
Damian looked back once. Looked at his left leg like he was having a private conversation with it. Looked at the CPIB fence.
"Go," he said.
[ DAMIAN ]
The fence was doable.
Hip height concrete base, metal fence above it, total height maybe a meter and a half. Not designed to stop someone who actually wanted to get over it. I hit the concrete base at speed, got my hands on the top rail and pulled. My arms did their share. My left leg did less than its share but I compensated and got myself up and over and dropped to the other side, landing on both feet, the left one sending a complaint up through my hip that I acknowledged and immediately set aside.
I turned.
"Echo," I said.
Theo-3 was already there. He lifted Echo from the backpack with both hands, careful of her leg, and passed her over the fence to me. She came without complaint, tail down but calm, reading the situation correctly as one requiring cooperation rather than enthusiasm.
Theo-3 came over next. More precise than me, less momentum-dependent, finding the exact grip points and moving through the motion cleanly. The fence barely registered his weight.
We were inside.
I caught my breath for four seconds because four seconds was what the situation would give me.
Then the infected reached the fence.
The first one hit it without slowing, hands going through the gaps in the metal, face pressing against it with that total absence of self-preservation that was one of the most wrong things about them. The second arrived beside it. Then three more. Then more behind those, stacking up, the ones at the back pushing the ones at the front, the whole mass of them pressed against the perimeter fence and reaching through it toward us.
They couldn't climb. Couldn't find the sequential coordination that climbing required. Each attempt dissolving before it got halfway. Just the reaching, patient and continuous and not going anywhere.
Something cold moved through my chest.
I had seen this in a film once. Years ago. Before the war, before any of this — a zombie film where the survivors stood and watched the infected press against a fence exactly like this. Everyone in the cinema had known what was coming. Had watched it happen anyway.
I had laughed at parts of that film.
"We need to go up," I said.
"Yes sir," Theo-3 said. He had been looking at the fence line too. More arriving. The stack thickening. "The carpark ramp. Second level."
We moved inside.
[ NARRATOR ]
The ground floor of the CPIB building was dark and undisturbed. Government offices frozen mid-operation, ... monitors dark, documents on desks, coffee mugs sitting where they had been set down on an ordinary Tuesday morning and never picked up again.
The carpark access ramp curved upward to the right, the concrete slope leading to the open second level where twelve stopped EVs sat in their bays in the particular stillness of things that had not moved in five months.
They came up the ramp slowly.
On the second level Damian walked to the outer barrier and looked down. Forty infected at the fence below now, pressed against the perimeter, the ones at the back pushing the ones at the front, the whole mass of them oriented toward the building.
He turned away from the barrier.
"Check the level," he said.
Theo-3 moved through the parked vehicles, sensors active, amber eyes sweeping the space methodically. "No signals on this level. The stairwell access from below is currently unoccupied."
Damian nodded. Set his pack down against the wall. Sat.
Echo sat beside him immediately, pressing into his left side, her chin finding his knee with the precision of something that had been doing this long enough to know exactly where it went.
Theo-3 stood a few meters away and said nothing.
Then Damian reached into the pack.
The knife came out. He set it on his knee, point down, handle up.
Theo-3 looked at the knife. Opened his mouth. Looked at Damian's face. Closed his mouth again. Filed it under not the right time and not the right place and stood quietly and let it be.
They rested.
[ DAMIAN ]
I heard it before I identified it.
A crackling. Intermittent. Coming from somewhere three or four vehicles down the row. The particular texture of a signal trying to come through interference, not static exactly, something with rhythm in it. Something transmitted.
I was on my feet before I had decided to stand.
Patrol EV, three vehicles down. Old model, dark blue with faded government markings. The display on the police band receiver still active, ... emergency battery keeping it alive after five months because patrol vehicles were built to keep that equipment running as long as physically possible.
The driver door was slightly open.
I noticed that before anything else. Slightly open, .... not kicked open, not all the way, just the few centimeters a door sits at when someone has pulled the handle from the inside and not followed through on the movement. Like starting a sentence and stopping.
I looked through the window before I opened the door.
He was in the driver's seat.
Senior officer. Rank insignia still on his collar. Service belt on, holster empty, .... I registered that detail with the part of my brain that never fully stopped cataloguing weapons. His hands were in his lap. His head was against the headrest. His expression was the specific stillness of a decision that had been made and completed.
He had not turned. No deterioration beyond what five months in a closed car produced. He had seen what was coming and he had chosen something else. Here, in this carpark, in this car, with the door slightly open like he had almost gone somewhere first.
I stood there looking at him and something happened that I hadn't expected.
Not grief. I didn't know him.
It was the door.
The slightly open door. The almost. Whatever had been on the other side of that word, one more attempt, somewhere to go, something to try, ... and then not. The decision made in the space between pulling the handle and following through.
And behind that, further back and darker, not from this carpark or this city or this year, ... something started moving in the fog. Not a memory. The shape of one. The weight of something that had happened in a different country in a different year that I couldn't see clearly but could feel pressing from the inside, trying to reach the surface.
A sound that might have been a name. A face dissolving before I could hold it. Something that had gone wrong in a way I had carried into the coma and carried out of it and was still carrying and couldn't put down because I couldn't fully see what I was holding.
I put my hand on the door frame.
Stood there until it retreated.
Then I reached past him carefully and took the walkie talkie from the passenger seat.
I closed the door gently. The latch clicking into place was the quietest sound in the carpark.
I turned around.
Theo-3 was there. He had followed without making a sound. He was looking at the car and then at me, his amber eyes doing the thing they did when they were processing something that didn't fit any existing category.
He didn't say anything.
I walked back to where we had been sitting and turned the walkie talkie over in my hands. Found the strongest incoming signal and held it there.
Static. Fragments.
Then a voice.
[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 154. 16:41 hours.
Damian found the walkie talkie.
Before that he found the man in the patrol car. I will not describe what was in the car beyond saying that the man had made a choice and followed through on it and that the door was slightly open in a way that suggested something about the moment before the choice was final.
Damian stood at that car for longer than the walkie talkie required.
I watched his face while he stood there. I have become reasonably accurate at reading Damian Kael Caine's face over the past twelve days. What I saw was not grief exactly. It was something older than grief. Something that came from before January and before the accident and before whatever the war put inside him that he is still carrying without being able to see it clearly.
He hid it the moment he turned around.
Efficiently. Quickly. The practiced ease of someone who has been hiding things from people who care about him for a long time.
I noticed. I said nothing. I am learning when nothing is the right thing.
He is now holding the walkie talkie and there is a voice coming through it and I am standing beside him and waiting to find out what the voice is going to ask of us.
End log.
End of Chapter 12