The loading bay door lurched inward at the bottom, the warped fra giving another inch, and through the gap ca the sll, that specific sll that Michael’s brain had catalogued in the first week and never stopped recognising, and with it the sound of the horde pressed against the outside of the building, a continuous low roar that had no beginning and no end, just pressure.
The leader looked at his two won at the back of the group, then looked at his n and the door.
"Move," he said.
---
Maya led the way and Michael let her because she was already three steps ahead of everyone else in terms of knowing where they were going.
She went down the central corridor at a pace that was fast without being panicked, reading the building as she moved, her eyes going up to the ceiling supports and across to the wall joints with the automatic assessnt of soone who couldn’t turn it off even now.
The zzanine access staircase was where she said it would be, at the far end of the warehouse floor behind a set of heavy shelving units, a tal staircase bolted to the interior wall leading up to a supervisor platform that ran the full width of the building above the storage floor.
Safety railing on three sides, solid tal decking, a small supervisor office enclosed at one end with a window overlooking the floor below.
"Up," Michael said and they went up.
Sera got the two won from the leader’s group moving when they hesitated, not roughly but with the particular directed energy she had when things needed to happen faster than people were making them happen.
The chain man went up. The two bat n went up. The fifth man went up. The leader went up last and Michael went after him and turned at the top and looked down at the staircase.
"Help with this," he said to the chain man.
The man looked at him for a second and then looked at the loading bay door which had given another two inches at the bottom and through the gap was visible now, the press of things outside, and he put his chain down and grabbed the staircase railing beside Michael and they pulled.
The staircase was bolted but the bolts were old and the tal was tired and between the two of them and Sera adding her weight from the top it ca away from the wall with a sound like a gunshot that echoed through the whole warehouse and they dragged it up onto the zzanine and laid it flat on the decking.
Twelve feet of empty air between the zzanine edge and the warehouse floor below.
Michael looked over the railing.
The loading bay door ca in thirty seconds later.
---
It didn’t fall, it folded, the bottom warping inward under sustained pressure until the chanism failed entirely and the whole thing buckled and the horde ca through the gap it left in a continuous pour that had no shape, just mass, Rotters compressed against each other by the weight of more Rotters behind them spilling into the warehouse floor with the particular sound of a thing that had been held back and wasn’t anymore.
Michael watched from the zzanine railing and counted and stopped counting because counting wasn’t useful information at this scale.
The warehouse floor filled.
Not instantly, it took maybe two minutes, but steadily and without pause, the horde spreading across the storage floor and between the shelving units and into the corridor and against the walls, and the sound of it was sothing he hadn’t heard before, not the ambient groaning of the city or the shuffle of individual Rotters in a hallway but sothing continuous and layered that sat in the chest like pressure.
Maya was beside him at the railing, both hands gripping it, looking down with wide eyes that were processing what they were seeing with the focused attention she applied to everything even when what she was seeing was this.
"There are hundreds of them," she said quietly.
"More," Michael said.
Shin was on his other side and she didn’t say anything, just looked down at the floor below with the steady composure she maintained even when it clearly cost her sothing to maintain it.
Sera had positioned herself back from the railing and was watching the leader’s group with the particular attention she gave to threats she hadn’t finished assessing yet. The leader was at the far end of the zzanine looking down at the horde with his handgun in his hand and his jaw tight and whatever he’d been planning to do with that handgun forty minutes ago was clearly sowhere else in his mind right now.
His two won were sitting on the decking against the supervisor office wall with their knees pulled up and their eyes down and Michael looked at them and then looked away because that was a conversation for when they weren’t standing on a tal platform above several hundred Rotters.
The chain man appeared beside Michael at the railing. He looked down for a long mont.
"We’re stuck," he said. It wasn’t a question.
"For now."
"For now," the man repeated like he was testing the weight of it. "How long is for now."
Michael pulled up the pulse and looked at the density of signatures filling the warehouse floor and extending out into the street beyond and ran the numbers with the particular focused calm that the system encouraged, everything becoming logistics when you had a blueprint interface running in your vision and a shop with two thousand SP in it.
"Hordes move," he said. "They don’t stay. Sothing drew them here and when that sothing stops drawing them they’ll drift." He paused. "The question is what drew them and whether it’s still active."
The chain man looked at him. "You talk like you know things."
"I know so things," Michael said.
From below sothing large moved through the horde with enough mass to displace the Rotters around it and Michael tracked it on the pulse and felt the particular weight of it and looked at the warehouse floor until he found it, a shape moving through the crowd below that was bigger than everything around it, shoulders above the Rotter mass, the bone plate growths of a Brute visible even from the zzanine height.
"That," Michael said, nodding down at it.
Everyone at the railing looked.
The Brute moved through the horde as the Rotters parted around it without it seeming to notice them. It had probably been drawing the horde behind it for blocks, the kind of Apex adjacent threat that acted as an unconscious anchor for the things around it.
"If that thing leaves the building the horde follows it," Michael said.
"And if it doesn’t," Sera said from behind him.
"Then we figure sothing else out."
The leader had co to the railing and was looking at the Brute below with the expression of soone updating a threat assessnt in real ti. "I’ve seen those before," he said. "Three of my people tried to take one down in the first week." A short pause that said everything about how that had gone. "You can’t fight that."
"Not conventionally," Michael said.
The leader looked at him sideways. "What does that an."
Michael was already looking at the warehouse layout in the Blueprint Interface overlay, mapping the structural points, the shelving unit positions, the cold storage bays, the ceiling mounted loading crane that ran on a track above the storage floor that he’d clocked when they first ca in and filed away as potentially interesting and was now reconsidering in a completely different context.
The crane.
It was a heavy industrial unit, ceiling mounted, designed for moving palletised loads across the warehouse floor, and it was still connected to the backup generator that was keeping the cold storage running which ant it was still powered which ant it still worked.
He looked at the crane track running above the horde below. Looked at the shelving units stacked with palletised goods, heavy, the kind of weight that beca a very different kind of problem when it was falling from height onto sothing that didn’t know it was coming.
He looked at the crane control panel mounted on the zzanine wall six feet to his left.
"Does anyone know how to operate a warehouse crane," he said.
Silence.
Then one of the leader’s won, the one who had been sitting against the supervisor office wall with her knees up, raised her hand slightly without looking up.
Everyone looked at her.
She looked at the crane control panel and then at Michael and she had the particular expression of soone who had been invisible for long enough that being looked at directly required a mont of adjustnt.
"Warehouse logistics," she said quietly. "Before."
Michael looked at the crane. Looked at her. Looked at the Brute moving through the horde below with its bone plated shoulders clearing a path through everything around it.
"What’s your na," he said.
She looked at him. "Anya."
"Anya," he said. "How good are you with that crane."
She looked at the control panel for a second and then looked at the Brute below and sothing in her expression shifted from invisible to present in a way that happened quickly and completely.
"Good enough," she said and stood up.
[Ding! New Survivor — Anya. 1 Bond Point.]
The leader looked at Anya standing up. Looked at Michael. His jaw worked once.
Michael looked back at him steadily and then turned to Anya.
"Show ," he said.
---
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