Chapter 3: Half-Life
The thermometer from the RPD first aid kit said a hundred and one point four. Claire read it twice against the lantern, as if the number might change its mind.
"Okay," she said. "So that's the run."
Leon sat against the wall with a blanket round his shoulders, because when he lay down the vault tilted. At six the radio had clicked twice, Hollis on schedule, and neither of them had mentioned it. Every time he'd surfaced in the night she'd been awake, with every medical kit they owned emptied onto the floor, reading labels by penlight. Aspirin. Eye drops. Salt tablets. Gauze, tape, petroleum jelly. Nothing that would touch what was happening under his skin.
"What run?"
"The pharmacy I saw from the roof. Five blocks east." She was pulling on her boots. "The ramp read point oh five this morning. Outside's maybe double. Two hours out there is a fifth of a roentgen. I took more than that on the roof."
"Not alone."
He hadn't meant it to come out so flat and loud. She looked up.
"You've got a fever of a hundred and one, Leon."
"So I'll shoot a little left."
"You'll shoot me. I watched you try to open a soda last night."
"It was a tough soda."
"Don't do the jokes." She stood. "Those lines go up your neck and into your chest, and then it's in your blood, and I can't fix that with 1962 gauze. I'm faster on my own, and I'm not sick. So I'm going."
"And if something gets you out there?" He got up. The vault swung; he put a hand on the wall and kept going. "If you go down in some street with nobody behind you, I sit here and listen to Hollis click twice every other morning until the crackers run out?"
"That's not—"
"You came back for me." It came out before he could stop it, the thing he'd been carrying since the platform. "You were on the train, Claire. You were out. Sherry was screaming your name and you stepped off, and the doors shut, and that's why you're here. Because of me. You don't get to walk out of here alone and not come back and have that be because of me too."
Her face closed. When she spoke, her voice was low and furious.
"Is that what you think? That I'm here because of you?"
"I was there."
"I'm here because I decided. That one's mine." She crossed the floor and stopped in front of him, close enough that he could see the ash still caught in her eyelashes. "You don't get to take it off me and turn it into one more thing you feel bad about. You've already got Marvin and that woman and God knows who else in there. I'm not going on the pile."
He had no answer for that.
"Together," he said finally. "You lead. I cover. If my hands get bad, we turn around. I swear."
She looked at him until he thought she'd say no.
"If you fall over out there," she said, "I'm leaving you."
"That's fair."
They went at nine. The two cruisers they'd rolled into the mouth of the ramp on the fourth day left a gap they'd packed with a mattress and filing cabinets, ten minutes' work to shift. Each of them had a pen dosimeter clipped to the collar, charged to zero, and a wet bandana over the face against the ash. Leon had the nine-millimeter with thirty-seven rounds and the shotgun across his back with four shells; Claire had the launcher, three rounds, and the knife. Turnaround was ten-thirty, no matter what.
He followed her through the gap into the dim brown daylight, and the ash closed over his boots.
The city was so quiet Claire could hear the ash.
It squeaked under her boots like cornstarch. It lay over everything in a smooth gray blanket, drifted knee-deep against the walls, softening every shape: cars, fallen power lines, a mailbox on its side, a long low mound on the sidewalk she didn't look at twice. The air was cold and tasted of wet char through the bandana.
She kept to the middle of the street, away from walls that might come down, and looked back every twenty steps. Leon was always there, ten feet behind, pistol low in both hands, his face above the bandana gray as the ash. He nodded every time. She didn't like how slowly he nodded.
At the second intersection they found half a Licker.
It lay across the hood of a bus, opened from the ribs down, claws hooked into the metal as if it had tried to hold on. Something had stood here and pulled it in two and eaten the part it wanted, then walked off north, and the tracks it left were as wide as tractor tires and deeper than her boots.
Claire looked at Leon. Leon looked at the tracks. Neither of them said anything, and they went on a little faster.
The burned one came out of a doorway on Warren Street, a block short of the pharmacy.
It was quick for something with no skin left. Leon fired twice. One shot spanged off a lamppost; she saw his face behind the gun, white and furious, the barrel drawing small circles in the air. The thing turned toward the noise, and Claire stepped in on its blind side and put the knife in under its jaw the way she'd learned the first night, and it folded into the ash.
"I had it," Leon said.
"You had the lamppost." She wiped the blade. "Ten minutes."
The pharmacy's front window lay across the floor in glittering heaps under the ash. Inside, the aisles still stood, shampoo and greeting cards and reading glasses in neat rows under a gray coat of dust. Leon took the doorway, where he could see the street, and Claire went over the back counter on her stomach and dropped down behind it.
Stock bottles, hundreds, alphabetical. She ran the penlight along them. Amoxicillin: a gap and a dusty ring where it should have been. Somebody had beaten her to it, back when there were still people looking. Cefaclor, two bottles. Cephalexin, five hundred milligrams, a big white bottle of a hundred. She knew that name. Chris had taken it for a week at sixteen after going through a fence on a dirt bike and refusing to tell their mother. She grabbed it, and the cefaclor, and doxycycline from further down, because she didn't know which one was right and she wasn't coming back.
"Claire," Leon said from the door. "Time."
"One minute." A dozen D cells off the rack by the register. Gauze, tape, iodine, two elastic bandages. And on the bottom shelf of the snack aisle, two cans of peaches in heavy syrup, which she looked at for a full second as though they were made of gold.
She was putting the second can in the bag when she heard the ceiling.
A slow creak overhead. There was an apartment above the store, and something up there had just shifted its weight. Plaster dust sifted down through her penlight beam.
She switched the light off.
In the gray glow from the window, Leon had gone still in the doorway, the pistol lifted toward the ceiling. Between them were three aisles and thirty feet of floor.
The tiles above the second aisle bowed, and gave, and the Licker came down through them onto the shelves.
It had been burned too. Its bare muscle had cooked dark and split, and the exposed brain on top of its skull had gone the color of liver. It crouched on the shampoo aisle with its claws in the metal, and the long tongue slid out and tasted the air, and its head turned toward the door.
Toward Leon. Toward his breathing, quick and rough with fever and loud as a saw in that silence. He couldn't quiet it. She watched him try.
Claire slapped her palm down hard on the counter.
The head whipped round. The Licker launched itself off the shelf straight at the sound, and she had the launcher up and fired before it landed, and the acid round took it full in the chest.
It screamed. It came down short, thrashing, tearing up the linoleum, and slammed sideways into the support post at the end of the counter, once, twice, the whole store shuddering. Over her head something cracked like a rifle shot.
She had time to see the ceiling coming down at her in one gray piece, to throw herself under the lip of the counter, and to think, very clearly, the peaches.
Then everything was noise, and then everything was dark.
The dust was so thick Leon couldn't see his own hand.
He was on his knees by the door with no memory of getting there, coughing into the bandana. Somewhere inside the gray the Licker was still screaming. Then it made a wet sound, and then a dry one, and stopped.
"Claire."
Nothing.
"Claire."
He went in half blind. The second aisle had folded flat. Beyond it, where the counter had been, there was a slope of ceiling: plaster and lath, a joist as thick as his thigh, the iron bones of a bedframe from upstairs, and a Licker's claw sticking out from under it all, still twitching. He put two rounds through the plaster where the rest of it had to be, holstered the pistol, and started digging.
"Claire. Talk to me."
He threw plaster. He threw a drawer of pill bottles. He heaved a slab of lath away and felt the wound on his shoulder tear open under the tape, wet and hot, and didn't care. The joist lay at a slant, one end on the floor and the other across the end of the counter, and the counter, the solid old built-in counter, was holding it up.
Under it, in a pocket of dark the size of a coffin, something moved.
"Leon?" A long, ugly cough. "My leg."
He got the flashlight in. She was on her side under the counter's lip, gray from head to foot, eyes wide and bright. The joist had pinned her right foot to the floor.
"Is it broken?"
"I don't know. I can't move it. Leon, the noise. They'll have heard."
He knew. He looked back through the broken window, and down Warren Street, in the brown light, three shapes were coming. Then four. Burned black, dragging through the ash. Two hundred yards.
"Go," Claire said. "Take the bag and go, you can't lift that by yourself—"
"Stop talking."
He wrenched a steel upright out of the wrecked shelving, seven feet long, jammed its end under the joist with a broken cinderblock beneath for a fulcrum, and leaned on it with everything he had.
Nothing. Then a groan from the wood. A quarter inch.
"When it goes," he said through his teeth, "pull."
The fever roared in his ears. His shoulder was a white sheet of pain and the dressing was soaked through, and the joist lifted a half inch, an inch, and Claire grunted and scraped and said "Out," and he let go, and it came down with a boom that shook more ceiling loose.
The first of the burned things reached the front window.
Claire was up on one leg, holding the counter. Leon grabbed the duffel and got her arm across his left shoulder, the good one, and they went out the back, through a storeroom and a fire door into an alley drifted with ash. Behind them glass crunched as something climbed in.
"Don't carry me," Claire said through her teeth.
"I'm not carrying you."
"You're carrying me a little."
"You're leaning on me. I'm leaning on you. It's a mutual arrangement. Left here, then straight."
Five blocks like that, her hopping, him lurching, both of them gasping through wet bandanas, and the burned things followed the whole way at the same terrible walking pace, never gaining, never falling back. Twice Leon turned and fired, and the second time he hit what he aimed at. His hands were steady. He had no idea why.
At the ramp Claire went through the gap first, on her backside, dragging the duffel, and he went after her and threw his weight against the filing cabinets until they slid back into the hole. A minute later something hit them from outside, and again, and then went quiet and scraped away.
He sat down in the ash at the bottom of the ramp. Claire sat down beside him with her bad foot out in front of her and pulled the bandana off, and there was a clean stripe across her nose and mouth where it had been.
"You came back," she said.
"Turns out," he said, "it's contagious."
The label said one capsule four times a day, and Claire watched him swallow the first with a mouthful of filtered rainwater as if he might try to palm it.
"I'm taking it," Leon said.
"I'm watching you take it."
"You get very bossy after you've been under a building."
"Ten days. Forty capsules. That leaves sixty, a second round for you or one for me if I'm stupid enough to need it. Every six hours. I'll wake you."
She'd done the rest before she let herself sit down. Cleaned his shoulder with boiled water and the new iodine, which made him swear in a way she found deeply satisfying. Wrapped her ankle, swollen like a softball and purple along the side; she could wiggle her toes, so she'd decided it was sprained, because she didn't have time for it to be anything else. Read both dosimeters against the lantern. Written it down.
RUN 1. Dose: C 0.14 R, L 0.16 R. Cephalexin x100, cefaclor x2, doxy x1. D cells 12. Peaches 2. Ankle sprained (decided). Ammo: L 31 rds, C 2.
Then she sat down on the mattress beside him, because they'd never pushed the mattresses apart again after the sixth night and neither of them had brought it up, and opened the first can of peaches with the knife.
The syrup smelled so sweet it made her dizzy. She speared a slice and held it out.
"You first," he said.
"I'll stab you."
He ate it. She ate the next. They passed the knife back and forth, one slice each, while the building creaked overhead and the radio sat silent on its cracker tin. When the slices were gone she drank half the syrup and handed him the can, and he finished it and set it down very carefully, as though it mattered where it went.
"I heard you," she said. "Under there. Telling me to stop talking."
"You wouldn't stop."
"I thought you'd go." She looked at her hands, still gray in the creases however hard she'd scrubbed. "I wanted you to. I could hear them coming and I thought, good. He'll take the bag and get the pills back here, and he'll be fine." She made herself look at him. "And then you didn't. And I was so angry. And I was so—" She stopped.
He was quiet for a while.
"I left Marvin," he said. "Did I tell you that? He told me to lock the door, and I did, and I could hear him through it. And Ada. I had her hand. I had it. And then the train." He rubbed his face. "I keep counting them. Today I was digging and I thought, if I've counted wrong one more time, that's it. I'm done."
"You count wrong all the time," Claire said.
He looked at her.
"You do the math on everybody you didn't save and leave the rest off. Sherry's on a helicopter because you held that platform. You leave her off. Me, about a dozen times since Tuesday. Me today." Her voice was steadier than she expected. "Your numbers are wrong, Leon. I'd know. I'm the one with the pad."
He laughed, a cracked, tired sound, and put his head back against the brick, and then turned it and looked at her, and didn't look away.
The lantern was low. She could see the fever still in him, the flush along his cheekbones, the ash he'd missed at his hairline. She could see him waiting. He wasn't going to ask. He'd leave it to her; she'd stood in front of him that morning and told him what was hers to decide.
She leaned in and kissed him.
He went very still, the way he had in the pharmacy doorway, and then he wasn't still at all. His hand came up to her jaw, careful, as if she were the one with the fever. He tasted of peach syrup and smoke. It was short and slow and nothing like she'd pictured, on the nights she'd let herself picture it, and better, and when she pulled back an inch he followed and rested his forehead against hers, and they stayed like that, breathing the same cold air.
"Okay," Leon said, very quietly.
"Okay. Don't make it weird."
"Way too late for that."
She was smiling. She was about to kiss him again when the radio clicked.
Twice.
Her watch said 11:40 at night. Hollis listened at six in the morning, every other day.
The speaker hissed, and a voice came out of it that wasn't Hollis's: a man's, mild and courteous and unhurried, the voice of someone with all the time in the world.
"Officer Kennedy. Sergeant Hollis has been reassigned." A pause, long enough to let that sink in. "We understand you have a friend with you. We'd very much like to talk about getting you both out."