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“Off-limits.”
Holden sighed.
“She got away, didn’t she?” Holden asked.
“Almost for sure.”
They were silent. One of the linebackers coughed, stood up, and limped back into the casino, trailing blood from a hole in his ribs. The bhangra gave way to an afropop medley with a low, sultry voice singing in languages Miller didn’t know.
“She’d wait for us,” Holden said. “Don’t you think she’d wait for us?”
“Almost for sure,” Miller’s death-self said, not particularly caring if it was a lie. He thought about it for a long moment, then turned to face Holden again. “Hey. Just so you know it? I’m not exactly at my best right now.”
“Okay.”
“All right.”
The glowing orange lockdown lights on the tube station across the level clicked to green. Miller sat forward, interested. His back felt sticky, but it was probably just sweat. Other people had noticed the change too. Like a current in a water tank, the attention of the nearby crowds shifted from the mercenaries blocking the way to the port to the brushed-steel doors of the tube station.
The doors opened, and the first zombies appeared. Men and women, their eyes glassy and their muscles slack, stumbled out through the open doors. Miller had seen a documentary feed about hemorrhagic fevers as part of his training on Ceres Station. Their movements were the same: listless, driven, autonomic. Like rabid dogs whose minds had already been given over to their disease.
“Hey,” Miller said, his hand on Holden’s shoulder. “Hey, it’s happening.”
An older man in a pair of emergency services scrubs approached the shambling newcomers. His hands were out before him, as if he could corral them by simple force of will. The first zombie in the pack turned empty eyes toward him and vomited up a spray of very familiar brown goo.
“Look,” Holden said.
“I saw.”
“No, look!”
All down the casino level, tube station lights were going off lockdown. Doors were opening. The people were pulsing toward the open tubes and the implicit, empty promise of escape, and away from the dead men and women walking out from them.
“Vomit zombies,” Miller said.
“From the rad shelters,” Holden said. “The thing, the organism. It goes faster in radiation, right? That’s why what’s-her-name was so freaky about the lights and the vac suit.”
“Her name’s Julie. And yeah. Those incubators were for this. Right here,” Miller said, and sighed. He thought about standing up. “Well. We may not die of radiation poisoning after all.”
“Why not just pump that shit into the air?” Holden asked.
“Anaerobic, remember?” Miller said. “Too much oxygen kills ’em.”
The vomit-covered emergency medicine guy was still trying to treat the shambling zombies like they were patients. Like they were still humans. There were smears of the brown goo on people’s clothes, on the walls. The tube doors opened again, and Miller saw half a dozen people dodge into a tube car coated in brown. The mob churned, unsure what to do, the group mind stretched past its breaking point.
A riot cop jumped forward and started spraying down the zombies with gunfire. The entrance and exit wounds spilled out fine loops of black filament, and the zombies went down. Miller chuckled even before he knew what was funny. Holden looked at him.
“They didn’t know,” Miller said. “The bully boys in riot gear? They aren’t gonna get pulled out. Meat for the machine, just like the rest of us.”
Holden made a small approving sound. Miller nodded, but something was niggling at the back of his mind. The thugs from Ceres in their stolen armor were being sacrificed. That didn’t mean everyone was. He leaned forward.
The archway leading to the port was still manned. Mercenary fighters in formation, guns at the ready. If anything, they looked more disciplined now than they had before. Miller watched as the guy in the back with extra insignia on his armor barked into a mic.
Miller had thought hope was dead. He’d thought all his chances had been played, and then, like a bitch, it all hauled itself up out of the grave.
“Get up,” Miller said.
“What?”
“Get up. They’re going to pull back.”
“Who?”
Miller nodded at the mercenaries.
“They knew,” he said. “Look at them. They aren’t freaking out. They aren’t confused. They were waiting for this.”
“And you think that means they’ll fall back?”
“They aren’t going to be hanging out. Stand up.”
Almost as if he’d been giving the order to himself, Miller groaned and creaked to his feet. His knees and spine ached badly. The click in his lung was getting worse. His belly made a soft, complicated noise that would have been concerning under different circumstances. As soon as he started moving, he could feel how far the damage had gone, his skin not yet in pain but in the soft presentiment of it, like the gap between a serious burn and the blisters that followed. If he lived, it was going to hurt.
If he lived, everything was going to hurt.
His death-self tugged at him. The sense of release, of relief, of rest felt like something precious being lost. Even while the chattering, busy, machinelike mind kept grinding, grinding, grinding forward, the soft, bruised center of Miller’s soul urged him to pause, sit back down, let the problems go away.
“What are we looking for?” Holden said. He’d stood up. A blood vessel in the man’s left eye had given way, the white of the sclera turning a bright, meaty red.
What are we looking for? the death-self echoed.
“They’re going to fall back,” Miller said, answering the first question. “We follow. Just outside the range so whoever’s going last doesn’t feel like he has to shoot us.”
“Isn’t everyone going to do the same thing? I mean, once they’re gone, isn’t everyone in this place going to head in for the port?”
“I expect so,” Miller said. “So let’s try to slip in ahead of the rush. Look. There.”
It wasn’t much. Just a change in the mercenaries’ stance, a shift in their collective center of gravity. Miller coughed. It hurt more than it should have.
What are we looking for? his death-self asked again, its voice more insistent. An answer? Justice? Another chance for the universe to kick us in the balls? What is through that archway that there isn’t a faster, cleaner, less painful version of in the barrel of our gun?
