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Veek grabbed Tim’s arm. He shook her off and tried to roll away. The spear shifted in his chest and he screamed. He grabbed Nate’s shirt with his bloody hand. “Go!” he yelled. “Get everyone safe.”

“Everyone means you, too, old man.”

He slapped Nate, but the strength was gone from his hand. “Told you I’d kick your ass,” Tim wheezed. His head lolled back to look at the overseers and he pawed at his holster with weak fingers. “Get home. I’ll buy you some time.”

And then he died.

In the movies, Nate knew, he would stay by Tim’s body and wail. Veek would break down and cry with him. Maybe he’d throw his friend over his shoulder and lumber back to the building where they’d save him with a last minute miracle. Or they’d make a quick booby trap of his body with some explosives they’d find in Tim’s pack. At the least, they’d close his eyes, like people always did.

In reality, a pair of spears hit the sand a few feet from them moments after Tim’s last words. Veek threw herself backwards on the sand. Nate yelped and fell on his ass. A third spear landed between his leg and his hand. His hip throbbed and blossomed red where it’d grazed him.

They scrambled to their feet, left Tim’s body and the bikes, and ran the last hundred feet to the Kavach Building.

Roger was already up on the slab. A spear quivered on the concrete next to him. He reached down, grabbed Veek’s arm, and hauled her up onto the landing. She rolled to her feet and dashed up the steps. “What about Tim?” he yelled down at Nate.

Nate shook his head and heaved himself halfway up onto the slab. Roger grabbed his belt and dragged him the rest of the way. Another javelin hit the sand below his feet, and one more cracked against the concrete to his right. The thought flickered through Nate’s mind that it wasn’t wood, but a long piece of bone.

They followed Veek up the steps. She sucked on her inhaler as she held the security door open for them. They yanked it closed behind them. Nate twisted the lock and a spear clanged against the metal mesh.

Roger was already on the second door, the big wooden door that was old-fashioned wide and always open. He slammed it shut and looked for a deadbolt or knob to twist. “Shit,” he said. “This door doesn’t lock?”

“No one ever closes it,” said Veek.

Roger looked through the glass panes. “We got maybe two minutes,” he said. “They’re almost to Tim.” He kicked his foot up against the base of the door, bracing his heel against the hardwood floor. The echo of another spear rang against the outside.

“Get Clive,” Nate told Veek. “We need a hammer and nails and some boards.”

She ran up the curving staircase.

Nate’s hip throbbed as he ran to the mailboxes and looked for something to barricade the door. There were some dusty phone books and the trash can where people dumped junk mail. He thought about prying one of the brass plaques off the wall.

“They’re past Tim,” said Roger. “First one’s here and climbing up.”

Clive galloped down the stairs with his bright yellow screw gun. His other arm pinned some short boards against his side. He dumped the boards, caught one as it fell, and jammed it next to Roger’s foot just as something large smashed into the security door. Nate glanced over Roger’s shoulder and saw two bulging eyes glaring back at him.

No
, he thought,
three eyes.

The DeWalt
whirrrred
twice and the board stood on its own. Clive fired two more screws into it and then stood up a second jack. The security door rang like a cymbal set.

“They look pissed,” said Roger. He still had his foot against the door and showed no sign of moving it.

“Yeah,” Nate said.

“Tim dead?”

Clive stopped. He looked up at Nate with his mouth open.

Nate closed his eyes. He grabbed for memories of drinking beers on the roof and saw a glistening spearhead sticking out between ribs. He tried to remember Tim cheerfully deflecting questions about his past and saw the twisted head and blank eyes looking across the sand. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Roger looked at the things outside the window. Three of them pounded the steel mesh and snarled. More climbed up behind them. “You sure?” he asked.

Nate looked out at the creatures and realized what Roger was really asking. “Yeah,” he said again. “It was quick. He didn’t...I don’t think he suffered much.”

Clive made a sound they couldn’t decipher and bent back to work. He ran a third board flat on the floor alongside the door and fired a handful of screws into it. “Best I can do for now,” he said. He pointed at the door and swept his arm back down the hall. “We can wrestle one of the big legs from the loft down here and I can run it right from the center of the door to...shit.”

The word sounded clumsy, like he was speaking a language he wasn’t fluent in. Nate realized he’d never heard Clive swear before.

He followed Clive’s gaze down the hall.

The back door was open.

* * *

Debbie scooped up the shotgun when Clive ran downstairs. She didn’t like guns. Not at all. But she’d come to realize she liked Andrew even less. The bruise on her jaw kept that fresh in her mind.

Andrew still hadn’t moved. She hoped it was because he was intimidated by the shotgun. She kept her finger on the guard, not the trigger, just like Clive had been doing.

Xela showed Veek her diagrams and highlighted the dust with the flashlight. “I would’ve done most of them already,” she explained, “but I didn’t know if there was a tipping point. Maybe we’d get halfway through and hit the one that makes the building switch back. I didn’t want to leave without you guys.”

“I appreciate that,” said Veek. She looked at the elaborate sketches. “How long is this going to take? To flip them all?”

Xela shrugged. “Five or six minutes, maybe. There’s over fifty of them.”

Veek glanced at the broken windows. The sound outside grew louder. She imagined it was the noise a swarm of angry lobsters would make.

“He only spent two or three shutting it off,” Debbie said. She tipped her head at Andrew.

“Yeah, but he didn’t care what he was doing,” said Xela. “We want to make sure we get it right. Everyone’s inside now, right?”

“Everyone...”
Except Tim
, Veek was about to say. Part of her wanted to believe the not-a-publisher was going to appear in the doorway. If there was a book on not dying from impalement and other traumatic chest wounds, his imaginary small press probably put it out. “Everyone’s inside,” she said with a nod.

Xela reached out to flip the first switch.

A sharp snap echoed in the apartment, the sound of plastic cords breaking. It was just loud enough to hear over the sounds outside. Debbie lifted the muzzle of the shotgun. She moved her finger to the trigger but she went too far and couldn’t find the little lever. She was sliding her finger back and forth beneath the guard, not inside it.

Andrew stood right in front of her, baring his teeth in a smile. He swept the barrel away just as her finger found the trigger. The noise was like thunder in the apartment and the smell stung their noses.

Xela flinched and Mandy started screaming again. Veek threw up her hands and felt a hard kick. She’d gotten in a nasty fight once and been punched in the gut. It felt like that, but hard enough that she felt it straight through to her back. She wasn’t sure who’d hit her this time.

Andrew snatched the shotgun away from Debbie. He swung it like a club and hit her across the face. The swing became a throw that hurled the weapon across the room at the windows. It hit one of the broken mullions and spun out over the desert.

Mandy howled and launched herself at Andrew. Her frustration, confusion, and anger all boiled over and she clawed and punched and kicked at him. He retreated for a moment and then the back of his hand sent her tumbling across the room. Fresh blood sprayed from her nose and mouth.

As Andrew marched out the door, Veek dropped to her knees and fell over.

* * *

Clive thundered down the hall with Nate a few steps behind him. His bleeding hip was getting numb, and he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. For now, it was good.

They dashed through the lower fire door and down the short flight of steps to the landing. The back door swung outward. He needed to reach outside and kick away the broken cinderblock everyone used to prop it open. Just opposite the door he could see a row of feet—the bodies of the Family.

Nate stepped outside. He felt exposed out on the broken slab of concrete. The wide expanse of sand stretched out behind the building. The blood-colored sky loomed over him.

The back door was much newer than the front one. It was wrapped in metal with a wire-reinforced window at the center. A hinged arm with a piston at the top made sure it wanted to stay shut. The knob was a ball of brushed steel. It had, much to his satisfaction, a small dial at the center to activate the lock.

Nate kicked at the cinderblock, missed, and his hip flared. He felt the block’s rough edges grate on the bottom of his sneaker. He kicked again, lower, and it shifted a few inches. The door moved as much and they both came to rest again. He pulled back his foot to kick again and heard a noise behind him. It was a horror-movie sound. Clive made a strangled noise and he knew he was right.

It was a body shifting on concrete.

He looked over his shoulder while his foot felt around for the cinderblock. The old woman—Andrew had called her “Auntie”—had rolled up on her side, her back to them. For a moment Nate thought she was admiring the view, stretched out alongside the ten foot drop like a bloated poolside beauty. Her misshapen head hung limp and grazed the concrete.

Nate’s toes found the cinderblock. This time he braced the ball of his foot on it and gave a steady push. It scraped free of the door and the hydraulic arm took the weight. He tried to pull it, but it hissed at him. The same damned arm that made it close automatically also made sure it closed at a slow, steady rate.

The old woman flopped back down onto her back and her arm bounced on the ground. Her sundress and one side of her cardigan were twisted into a ball on her chest. There was a distant sound, like someone grunting through a mouthful of water.

Clive dragged him back into the building and the door shut itself. There was a loud click as the latch struck the plate. Their hands smacked together reaching for the lock and both pulled back. They tried again and both hesitated. Nate’s hand lunged in and locked the door.

There was a blur of movement and a dry rasp from outside.

A pair of hands sat at the edge of the concrete slab. They had spidery fingers and skin like an eel. Nate and Clive heard a low hiss and a third hand reached up. The top of a head appeared. It was bald with patches of hair. There were small spots that might have been melanomas, but Nate thought they were scales catching the light.

The head bobbed up for a moment, slipped down again, and reappeared as a forearm was heaved up onto the slab. The creature grunted with effort. Nate saw a jaw like a bear trap, bristling with narrow, glassy teeth. A swollen, pale eye the size of a silver dollar dominated one side of its head. The other side had two small eyes, the eyes of a rat or a spider. None of them had lids. It was the face of a deep sea monstrosity that should never see the sun. Not a sun in the prime of its life, anyway.

The overseer’s hand shifted and landed on Auntie’s arm. The limb shifted and her body slid toward the edge. The creature flailed for a better grip and sank its hand into the old woman’s stomach. Her body rolled onto its side again, and this time it rolled all the way over and off the edge. The spidery hands vanished and they heard the distant sound of impact and chittering.

“If she hadn’t been there,” murmured Clive, “they would’ve gotten up.”

“You think this door’s going to hold?”

Clive looked at it. “Not much else we can do,” he said. “Metal door, brick walls, concrete floor.” He tapped his foot on the landing, then glanced back at the rear stairwell’s institutional banister. “We could tie it off. Just tie the knob to the banister to hold it shut. I’ve got some sash cord upstairs.”

Nate nodded. “Let’s get it. And that big board for the front—”

The blast of the shotgun echoed down the stairwell.

They looked down the hall at Roger. He’d heard it, too. He locked eyes with Nate. “Go!” he yelled. “Get the damned machine turned back on!”

Veek curled up in a ball on the floor. “Jesus,” she wailed. “Oh,
fuck
that hurts.”

Xela dropped to the floor and winced as her leg flared. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” She tried to pry Veek’s hands away from her stomach. “Let me see it.”

Veek howled again. Mandy moaned and pulled herself back into her ball of knees and arms.

“What happened?” yelled Clive as he ran in from the hall.

“She got shot,” said Debbie. Her lip was split and blood trailed down her chin. “Andrew got loose and he hit the gun and—”