Page 61 of Blood We Steal

Part of me wanted to tell him it wouldn’t make a difference. Counting wouldn’t change that there wasn’t enough, and there was less every day.

“You don’t need that,” he tossed over his shoulder.

I put the clipboard down but stuck my pen in my pocket.

Never know when I might need to take a note. Stupid Simone. I chuckled and Rubin looked at me like I wasn’t sane. He might be right. I chuckled again and then heard a faint scuffle upstairs and shivered.

“I wonder what’s going on up there,” I whispered.

“You shouldn’t,” Rubin said. “What’s going on up there only matters to the degree that it affects you down here. So push it out of your mind. Stay focused on what matters.”

“Yes, krye,” I muttered.

He heard me but didn’t look back. And we walked. The lights were on now, and the hallways were unnervingly bright.

Where are we going? I wondered.

The stairway down three floors into the courtyard, was in the opposite direction. Rubin just kept walking and I followed. We went down one flight of stairs and I noticed a barricade. I didn’t know how they had done it, but it looked like they had ripped off some of the metal tables, piled everything in front of the stairwell door. Got to the second floor and saw the same thing.

He stopped at the first floor. “Come on,” he said.

This hallway was also bright, but that wasn’t a good thing. The walls and floors were splattered with blood and bodies, and I breathed through my mouth, which did nothing to ease the smell.

“What are we doing down here, Rubin?” I asked.

Rubin didn’t answer and instead banged the baton in his hand against the door.

Clang, clang, clang.

The sound was hollow, but also shattering.

“Rubin!” I whisper-hissed.

He didn’t look at me and instead stared down the hall, his body tense, waiting.

I looked from him to the hall, which was mercifully still empty, then back at him, and then I heard it. That moan, the scrape of something against the floor.

I kept my gaze on Rubin, not wanting to look, knowing that I had to. I turned and saw a figure—a man wearing a white prison uniform that had been tinted pink with blood. His intestines were hanging out of the gash that ran from his chest to his navel and one of his brown prison-issue flip-flops had come off. He ambled toward us, his milky eyes unerringly focused.

“Rubin, what are you doing?” I whispered.

There was no reason to whisper. The thing had locked onto us and terrible experience had taught me that it wouldn’t be deterred now. Rubin didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed the baton into my hand.

It clanked even louder as it fell to the floor.

“Pick it up, Simone.” He wasn’t paying the thing any attention. He was focused squarely on me, and the tension I had seen in his body before was gone. “Pick it up,” he said again.

The thing got closer.

And even though I wasn’t looking at it, couldn’t let myself, I reached down and picked up the baton. The weight should have been comforting in my hand, but it felt like an anvil.

“What are you doing, Rubin?”

“Nothing,” he said. Then he took a step back and I jumped.

“What—what—” I said.

The shambler got closer still.