Chapter 12: The Contested Zone

  Downtown Millfield started at the railroad tracks.

  Dave had lived in Millfield for six years and crossed those tracks a thousand times. Driving to the grocery store, walking to the diner on Third Street, once carrying a very drunk college roommate home from a wedding at the Elks Lodge. The tracks had always been a minor landmark, something you stopped noticing.

  They weren't there anymore.

  The tracks had been pulled upward. That was the only way Dave's brain could process it. The steel rails and wooden ties and gravel bed had been drawn skyward in a long, curving arc. They rose thirty feet in the air, twisted, and curved back down a block east, plunging into the roof of what used to be the post office. The rails glowed faintly along their length, a dull amber that pulsed at irregular intervals.

  "Well," Noor said. "That's new."

  Emma was awake and alert, her head turning in the carrier with sharp, birdlike movements. The warmth in Dave's chest was running hot. A steady furnace that had been building since she woke up, sharpened by the bottle, focused by something about this place. The system text hadn't appeared since the hospital. But Dave felt it gathering, the way you feel a sneeze building before it arrives.

  They crossed where the tracks had been. The ground underneath was smooth, fused into something that looked like dark glass, with shapes moving slowly beneath the surface, too deep and too formless to identify.

  Noor looked down at her feet. Looked at the glass. Looked at Dave.

  "Don't think about it," Dave said.

  "I'm a medical professional. My entire job is thinking about things."

  "Then think about it later."

  Downtown was worse than the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods had been damaged: cracks, collapses, transformation of individual houses. Downtown had been restructured. Buildings hadn't just broken; they'd merged. The savings bank and the hardware store had flowed into each other, creating a single structure with two faces and no doors. The stoplight at Main and Third was still hanging, but it was growing, thin metallic tendrils extending from its base into the sidewalk, spreading in a root pattern that covered half the intersection. The tendrils pulsed with the same amber light as the rails.

  The creatures here were different, too.

  In the neighborhoods, the things had been organic. the frog-things, the swamp creatures, the transformed animals. Downtown creatures were made of the city itself. Dave saw one perched on a second-story window ledge: roughly the size of a German shepherd, built from brick and mortar, its body a seamless extension of the building it sat on. It had no eyes but it had a face, a flat, triangular arrangement of cracks that suggested awareness. It watched them pass with the patient stillness of a gargoyle.

  ~*~

  Brick Watcher — Level 4

  Territorial. Won't attack unless you touch its building.

  Don't touch its building.

  ~*~

  Dave gave the building a wide berth. Emma stared at the Watcher with frank curiosity. It stared back. Neither blinked, though for different reasons.

  More creatures deeper in. Wire nests made of tangles of electrical cable and telephone wire that had woven themselves into cocoon-like structures in the alleys between buildings. They hung from gutters and awnings, swaying gently in a wind Dave couldn't feel. Inside them, things clicked and hummed. Rubble hounds, low, flat creatures built from broken concrete and rebar, moving in packs of three or four along the streets. They were fast, but they kept their distance. Emma's aura, whatever it was broadcasting, was working. The hounds would approach to about sixty feet, stop, circle, and peel away.

  "They're afraid of her," Noor said.

  "Cautious." Dave could feel the way the warmth in his chest pulsed outward in waves, each pulse carrying something the creatures recognized. A signal. A frequency. This one is not for you.

  "There's a difference?"

  "Afraid means they'd run. Cautious means they're deciding."

  Noor absorbed this. "I'd prefer afraid."

  The post office was three blocks into downtown, a solid brick building that the rails had impaled but not destroyed. The front half was intact. The heavy walls, small windows, and construction that was built to last by people who expected bad weather and worse news. The back half was a mess where the rails had punched through the roof, but the front doors were standing and someone had barricaded them from the inside with filing cabinets.

  Dave heard voices. Multiple. Adults. The tense, fast back-and-forth of people debating something important without enough information.

  He knocked.

  The arguing stopped.

  "I've got a baby," Dave called. "And a medic. We're not looking for trouble."

  A long pause. Then the scrape of filing cabinets being moved. The door opened six inches and a face appeared. A man, late forties, brown skin weathered by decades of outdoor work, eyes that sized Dave up without hurry. He'd been reading people his whole life.

  "How old?" the man asked.

  "The baby? Nine months."

  "Not the baby. You."

  "Thirty-four."

  The man studied him for three more seconds. Then his eyes dropped to Emma, who was leaning forward in the carrier, arm extended, reaching for the man's face. Her fingers opened and closed in the universal baby gesture that meant come here, I want to grab you.

  The man looked at Emma's hand. Something shifted in his face. A recalculation. He opened the door.

  "Marcus Webb. This is my post office, as of about two hours ago. Come in. Don't touch the rails."

  Inside: eleven people. Four women, five men, two teenagers. Most of them sitting on the post office floor amid scattered mail and overturned sorting bins. Some were injured. A woman with a bandaged arm, a man holding an ice pack to his jaw. All of them looking at Dave and Noor and Emma with a mix of hope and suspicion that was becoming the default facial expression of the apocalypse.

  Marcus was a big man. Solid, the kind of density that came from decades of lifting heavy things for a living. UPS, Dave guessed from the brown shirt and shorts, and confirmed when he saw the logo on Marcus's cap, which he was still wearing. He moved through his little group with the natural authority of someone who'd always been in charge of whatever room he was in, whether anyone had officially given him the job or not.

  "Bulwark," Marcus said, when Dave asked. "Level 7. The system gave me an invisible shield that comes out of my hands. I can cover about a ten-foot radius if I push it. Kept the wire nests off us when we were trying to get to this building. Lost three people anyway." He said this with a flatness that Dave recognized. Grief compressed into data. Facts that would hurt later, when there was time.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Marcus looked at Emma. Really looked at her, the way that Noor had, but without the professional filter. It was the way a parent looks at a baby.

  "Got a daughter," Marcus said. "Kayla. Sixteen. She's in Greenville with my wife."

  "How far is Greenville?"

  "Forty miles. Northeast." A pause. "Past Serenity Springs, past the county line, past whatever the hell is happening to the farmland out there."

  Dave felt the number land. Forty miles. He was struggling with twelve.

  "Your system giving you anything about them?" Dave asked.

  "Nothing. Range limit, maybe. Or maybe it just doesn't care about my problems specifically." Marcus's jaw worked. "I'm going to find them. Soon as I get these people somewhere safe."

  Noor had already knelt beside the woman with the bandaged arm. The medical bag was open, supplies appearing with the efficiency of someone who'd stocked a crash cart a thousand times. The woman winced as Noor peeled back the bandage, then went still as Noor applied the enchanted ointment.

  "How does that— what is—"

  "Don't think about it," Dave and Noor said simultaneously.

  Marcus watched the wound close. His expression didn't change, but his shoulders dropped a quarter inch, which was the Marcus Webb equivalent of gasping in astonishment.

  "I need to tell you something," Dave said. He pulled Marcus aside, out of the group's earshot. "My daughter. The system calls her a Benefactor. I don't fully understand what that means. But she generates quests. For people near her. You're going to feel a pull."

  Marcus looked at him. "Already feel it. Showed up the second you walked in." He pulled up something invisible. His system interface. "Says 'Help the Daddy.' That's the actual text."

  Dave closed his eyes. "Yeah. She does that."

  "Your baby is assigning me homework."

  "She assigns everyone homework. She's very proactive for someone who can't walk."

  Marcus almost smiled. The almost was doing a lot of work. "Greenville's northeast. Where are you headed?"

  "Serenity Springs. Then maybe back to Millfield."

  "Serenity Springs is on the way to Greenville."

  "It is."

  Marcus looked at his group. Eleven people, some hurt, all scared, in a post office that wasn't going to hold forever. He looked at Noor, who was already treating the second injured person. He looked at Emma, who was still reaching for him with an arm that would not be denied.

  "The teenagers here, Jake and Priya, they're solid. They can hold this building. The Bulwark shield sticks to structures I've touched, fades after about four hours. Long enough for me to get back or for them to figure something else out." He was talking himself into it. Dave recognized the process. It was the arithmetic of responsibility, the terrible math of deciding who you can help and who you have to leave behind.

  "I'm not asking you to come," Dave said.

  "I know." Marcus took off his UPS cap. Put it back on. "But you've got a medic and a baby and a bottle of dish soap, and you're walking through a contested zone. You need a shield."

  He turned to his group and started talking. Calm, clear, practical. He told Jake and Priya what to do. He told the injured to rest. He told everyone that the building was safe for four hours and that help would come. It wasn’t a promise he could keep, but it was a promise they needed to hear.

  Then he picked up his pry bar and walked out with Dave.

  They made it two blocks before they found Javi.

  The pharmacy was a ruin. The ceiling was caved in, shelves toppled into a maze of debris. The system tagged it dead. But from behind the counter, a sound. Not a creature sound. A very human sound. The sound of someone trying very hard not to breathe.

  "Someone's in there," Noor said.

  Marcus raised his hand. The shield materialized with a faint shimmer in the air, curved, wide enough to cover the three of them. He stepped forward.

  "Come out," Dave called. "We're human."

  Nothing. Then a shuffle. A scrape. A head appeared above the pharmacy counter. Dark hair, brown skin, wide eyes. A kid. Sixteen, maybe. Skinny in the way that teenage boys are skinny before their bodies decide to catch up with their height. He was wearing a Millfield High hoodie and clutching a skateboard to his chest like a shield.

  "Are the dog things gone?" the kid asked.

  "The rubble hounds? They're outside. They won't come near us."

  The kid looked at Emma. At the faint gold glow around her. He looked at the shimmer of Marcus's shield. He looked at Dave, standing there with a crowbar and a baby, which was an image that clearly was not computing.

  "Is that a baby?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why do you have a baby in the apocalypse?"

  "She was here before the apocalypse. I'm just keeping her during."

  The kid stared. Then something broke in his face. Not composure, because he hadn't had any. The thin, brittle shell of I'm handling this that he'd been maintaining alone in a destroyed pharmacy for three hours. His chin trembled. His grip on the skateboard tightened until his knuckles went white.

  "I'm Javi," he said. "Javier Reyes. I was skating to school when everything… I've been in here since. I don't, my mom's in Akron. I don't know how to—" He stopped. Reset. Tried again. "Can I come with you?"

  Dave looked at Marcus. Marcus gave a fractional nod.

  "Yeah," Dave said. "You can come with us."

  Javi climbed over the counter. He was shaking. A full-body tremor he was trying to hide by moving fast, which didn't work because moving fast while shaking just made you look like you were shaking faster. He kept the skateboard tucked under his arm.

  "I don't have any powers," Javi said. "My system says Courier. Level 1. All I got is 'Fast Feet' and it just makes me run a little quicker, which, like, I could already run pretty quick? So that's not super helpful?"

  "A Courier is useful," Marcus said. "Fast messenger. Scout, if you're brave enough."

  "I'm not brave. I'm sixteen. I was going to school. I had a math test."

  "You survived three hours alone in downtown," Noor said, repacking her bag. "That's brave."

  Javi's chin trembled again. He bit it still. "Can the baby do something about the dog things? I saw her glowing."

  "She keeps them away," Dave said. "Stay close to us."

  "I'm going to stay so close to you. I'm going to be, like, uncomfortably close. You should know that in advance."

  He was good on his word. Javi walked six inches from Dave's left shoulder for the next four blocks, the skateboard tucked under his arm, his head on a swivel, talking constantly. He talked about the math test he was going to fail. He talked about his mom's cooking. He talked about a video game that had zombies, which he now felt was in retrospect inadequate preparation for actual zombies, which these weren't exactly but were close enough that the comparison felt warranted.

  Marcus walked point, shield up, pry bar in his right hand. Noor walked rear, box cutter out, medical bag over her shoulder. Dave was center with Emma.

  They were a party now. A real one: tank, healer, DPS with a baby, and a very scared kid with a skateboard. It wasn't a party Dave would have drafted in his game. It wasn't a party anyone would have drafted. But it was his party, and they were walking through the contested zone together, and the creatures gave them space, and for ten minutes, nobody died.

  Javi talked about his skateboard. It was a Powell-Peralta reissue, he said, a Steve Caballero model, and his mom had saved up for it for his birthday and he was never letting it go, never, he didn't care if the system said it was junk, it was the best thing he owned and the system could respectfully eat his entire—

  "Language," Dave said automatically.

  Javi stared at him. "Did you just language me? In the apocalypse?"

  "There's a baby present."

  "The baby is glowing and keeping zombie dogs away."

  "She can still hear you."

  Javi opened his mouth. Closed it. His face rearranged, confusion warming into recognition of what Dave was doing even if Dave wasn't fully conscious of doing it. The dad thing. The autopilot paternal correction that Dave deployed reflexively because that's what dads did, even in the apocalypse, even when a sixteen-year-old was justified in using whatever language he wanted.

  "Sorry," Javi said. Quietly. Not to Emma. To Dave.

  Marcus, up ahead, made a sound that might have been a laugh compressed into a single exhale.

  They kept walking. The contested zone pressed in around them. Gargoyles on window ledges, wire nests overhead, the glass ground occasionally flashing with movement beneath. Emma rode in the carrier, warm and watchful, her aura pulsing in waves that pushed the darkness back.

  Four blocks from the post office, the system pinged.

  ~*~

  Something big ahead.

  Be careful, Daddy.

  ~*~

  Dave raised his fist. The group stopped. Even Javi went quiet, which was its own kind of miracle.

  Ahead, at the intersection of Main and Seventh, something filled the road. Dave couldn't see it clearly. It was reflecting, throwing back images of the surrounding buildings like a living mirror, so his eyes kept sliding off it, unable to find an edge. Big. Bigger than the truck-creature from the neighborhood. It was crouched, or parked, or resting, in the exact center of the intersection, and the buildings around it had bent toward it, leaning inward as if drawn by gravity.

  The system text pulsed, slower this time. Cautious.

  ~*~

  Gridlock — Level ???

  Don't.

  ~*~

  The question marks were new. And deeply unwelcome.

  "We go around," Dave said.

  "Around where?" Marcus was scanning the side streets. Wire nests in both alleys. Brick watchers on every window. The only clear route was straight through the Gridlock's intersection.

  "Then we wait."

  "Wait for what?"

  Dave didn't answer. He was looking at Emma. She was looking at the Gridlock. Her face had an expression he'd never seen on her before. There was a focused intensity that made her look, for one uncanny moment, much older than nine months.

  Her hand tightened on Raf.

  The Gridlock shifted. Surfaces rippled. It had noticed them.

  "We wait," Dave said again, pulling the group back around the corner. "And we figure out another way."

  But there was no other way. The contested zone had funneled them here, to this intersection, to this creature, and the only path forward went through it.