Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Bryan had been told many things during his three weeks as a medical courier. He had been told to keep the cold packs sealed, to get a signature at every single drop, and never to leave the bag unattended, not even for a second, not even to use the bathroom, because the last guy had done that and was now, according to his supervisor, "pursuing other opportunities." 

What nobody had ever told him, in any of the orientation videos or the laminated handbook or the long, sighing phone calls with dispatch, was what to do when a man with half a face came at you from behind a dumpster.

So he ran, the way he hadn't run since a PE teacher had timed him on the mile in tenth grade and then quietly given up on him, all flailing elbows and slapping sneakers and lungs that felt like they'd been packed with wet sand. The green medical bag thumped against his hip with every stride, its strap biting into his shoulder, and he hugged it to his chest with both arms like it was a newborn. Some deeply stupid, deeply employed part of his brain was still insisting that if he dropped it, he'd have to fill out an incident report.

Behind him, the thing that used to be a man let out a wet, rattling moan, and it was closer than it had any right to be. It was walking. Bryan was sprinting, flat-out, for his life, and the dead guy was just sort of walking and keeping up anyway, which said something about either the dead or Bryan's cardio that he did not have time to think about.

"Nope," he panted, skidding around the corner of the Raccoon City Police Department on a slick of wet leaves. "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope - "

He knew this route, and somehow that was the worst part. He came down the side of the station three times a week, because the front steps were always crowded with smokers and the side entrance got him to the evidence-room clerk faster. Her name was Rita, and she sometimes gave him a mint from the bowl on her desk and asked whether he was eating enough. 

He had walked this exact stretch of pavement holding an iced coffee, thinking about nothing more serious than whether he'd make his four o'clock. Now the alley was dark and smelled of smoke, and the one streetlight halfway along was buzzing and flickering like it was having a breakdown of its own. Ahead of him, exactly where it always was, stood the gate.

It was tall and iron, painted a municipal green that had flaked away in patches to show rust underneath, and beyond it lay the courtyard, the side door, and the narrow hallway with the vending machine and the two staff bathrooms. One of those bathrooms had a lock that didn't catch properly, which Bryan knew because he had learned it the hard way, in front of a sergeant. At that moment none of it mattered, because past that gate there were walls, and doors, and probably a lot of people with guns who were paid to deal with exactly this kind of thing.

He hit the gate at full speed. He didn't really decide to; his legs simply never got the message to stop. The bars rang like a struck bell, and Bryan rebounded off them with a noise that wasn't quite a word, his forehead connecting with cold metal hard enough to make the streetlight briefly turn into two streetlights. He staggered, clutched the bag tighter, and grabbed a bar with his free hand to shake it. The gate rattled against a thick loop of chain and a padlock the size of his fist, and did absolutely nothing else.

"Oh, you're kidding me," he told the padlock, with real betrayal in his voice. "Since when are you locked? You've never been locked. I have been through you, like, fifteen times!"

The padlock had no comment.

A foot dragged across concrete somewhere behind him, slow and heavy, and Bryan went very still in the way rabbits go still, as though that had ever saved a single rabbit in the history of rabbits. Against every instinct he possessed, he turned his head. The man from the dumpster had rounded the corner, and in the sick orange stutter of the streetlight, Bryan could finally see him properly, and immediately wished he couldn't. 

His skin had gone the grey of old dishwater. His shirt was stiff and dark down the front with something that was absolutely not ketchup, and his lower jaw hung at an angle jaws were really not built to hang at. Worst of all were his eyes, which were milky and fixed, and, unmistakably, interested.

Bryan pressed his back flat against the gate until the bars dug into his spine. "Hi," he said, because apparently his mouth had decided this was a customer service situation. "Hey, Sir. I just want to say, I really don't think you want what's in the bag, I don’t - know, it could be an organ, or blood, wait - forget I said blood!”

The man lurched forward, arms coming up, and Bryan screamed.

It was not a manly scream, it was not even a particularly dignified one. It went up at the end like a boiling kettle and kept going for a long, honest while, bouncing off the brickwork and out across what was probably half of Raccoon City. He screamed while his free hand scrabbled blindly at his own body for anything at all that might help, and it closed around the only weapon a medical courier is ever issued, which is a clipboard.

He swung it with everything he had. It was a sturdy aluminium clipboard, the kind with a little storage compartment for receipts, and it caught the dead man across the side of the head with a bonk so hollow and cartoonish that, in any other circumstance, Bryan might have laughed. The man's head snapped sideways, his ruined jaw swinging like a loose cupboard door, and then it swung back around and he kept coming, teeth first, completely unbothered.

"Sign here!" Bryan shrieked, which was not a strategy, and hit him again, and then a third time, until the clip sprang off and a flurry of delivery slips went fluttering into the alley like confetti. The dead man's grey hands closed on the front of his jacket. His breath smelled like a meat drawer that had been unplugged for a month, and he was strong, much stronger than a man with that complexion had any right to be, dragging Bryan in by the collar with the dreadful patience of something that was in no hurry at all.

Bryan did the only thing left to him. He brought the medical bag up between them like a shield and shoved, putting his whole body behind it, and he felt the teeth close on thick green canvas instead of on his neck. The man worried at it like a dog with a chew toy. Bryan, screaming again, fresh and from the very bottom of his soul, planted a sneaker in the middle of the man's chest and kicked. The dead man reeled back two steps, teeth tearing free with a horrible ripping sound, and for one glorious second there was space between them.

Bryan didn't waste it. To the left of the gate, where the station's side wall met the alley, rose a high wall of old red brick, easily nine or ten feet, crusted with moss along the top and stained black where the gutters had wept down it for decades. Bryan had never once looked at it with any interest in all his deliveries. 

Now he looked at it the way a drowning man looks at a lifeboat. Shoved up against its base was a big blue municipal dumpster with its lid half open, and next to that, a stack of soggy cardboard boxes that had been collapsing in slow motion since roughly the Carter administration.

He went up the boxes first, which was a mistake, because they folded under him immediately and dropped him onto his knees in something damp. He went up the dumpster second, which worked better. He got one knee onto the lip and hauled himself onto the lid, the plastic flexing and booming under his weight. 

Behind him the dead man moaned and came on, grey fingers reaching, and they brushed the cuff of Bryan's jeans just as he threw the medical bag up and over the top of the wall ahead of him. The instant it left his hands he regretted it with his entire being, but there was no way he was climbing a wall one-handed.

"I'm sorry, Rita!" he wailed, to no one, and jumped.

His fingers caught the top of the wall. The brick was cold and slick with moss and left his palms raw and stinging, and for a long, horrible moment he hung there with his sneakers scrabbling against the face of it, kicking for purchase and finding mostly air. Something closed around his ankle, and he kicked down hard, feeling it connect with something soft that he'd be thinking about for the rest of his life, until the grip was gone. 

With a sound like a dying accordion, Bryan dragged himself up, got an elbow over, then a knee, and rolled across the top of the wall with absolutely none of the grace he'd seen in action movies.

He fell off the other side and landed flat on his back in the dark, with all the breath knocked out of him and the stars wheeling overhead through a haze of smoke. For several seconds he simply lay there, staring at the sky and listening to the dead man moan and slap his palms uselessly against the far side of the brick. Then, very slowly, a little hysterical, Bryan began to laugh.

"Okay," he wheezed to the sky. "Okay.. still employed."

Something soft and heavy was lying a few feet from his head. When he turned to look, it was the medical bag, slumped in a puddle with a neat, toothy crescent bitten out of one side. Bryan stared at it for a moment, then reached out and pulled it back onto his chest, and hugged it.

The other side of the wall turned out to be a narrow service yard, the kind of forgotten municipal space that existed purely to house air-conditioning units and broken office chairs. Bryan picked himself up out of the puddle slowly, testing each limb in turn the way he’d seen people do on hospital dramas, and found, to his considerable surprise, that everything still bent in the directions it was supposed to. 

His palms were scraped raw; his forehead had a lump on it roughly the size and shape of a gate bar; and the back of his jeans was soaked through with something he chose, firmly, to believe was rainwater.

He slung the medical bag over his shoulder again, wincing at the toothy hole in its side, and limped towards the only gap in the fencing he could see. That was where he found the officer.

He was sitting with his back against the chain-link fence, legs stretched out in front of him and chin tucked against his chest, as though he’d simply nodded off at the end of a long shift. For one hopeful, ridiculous second, Bryan believed that was exactly what had happened. Then he got closer, and saw the dark stain spread across the man’s uniform shirt, the torn place at his throat, and the way his eyes sat half open and fixed on nothing at all.

The name badge pinned to his chest read Dawson. His right hand still rested loosely around the grip of a black service pistol, as if he’d sat down meaning to use it and had simply run out of time. Bryan stood over him for a long moment, his heart going like a drum machine; then, very carefully, he crouched down at the edge of the man’s reach.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, Officer Dawson. Hi. I’m really, really sorry about this, and I want you to know I’m not, like, a looter, or a criminal, or anything. I’m a courier. I deliver.. stuff. I honestly don’t know what, they don’t tell me, but it’s important stuff, probably.”

He reached out with two trembling fingers and began easing the pistol free, watching the man’s face the whole time in case it decided to do something.

“I’m just borrowing it,” he went on, in the same hushed, apologetic voice. “Professionally. I’ll bring it back, I promise. I’ll, um, I’ll put in a good word for you with Rita; she’d like that, probably. You probably knew Rita.”

Officer Dawson did not object, which Bryan decided to take as consent. The gun was heavier than he’d expected, and far colder, and he held it the way he’d once held a friend’s pet snake: at arm’s length, with real uncertainty about which end was going to bite him. He had fired a gun exactly once in his life, at a county fair, at a row of tin ducks, and he had not hit a single one of the ducks.

He tucked it into the waistband of his jeans the way people did in movies, immediately pictured the many and varied ways that could go wrong, and moved it into his jacket pocket instead, where it dragged one whole side of his jacket down like an anchor.

“Thank you for your service,” he told the dead man, and meant it, before slipping out through the gap in the fence.

The gap let him out onto the street, and the sight of it stopped him in his tracks. He’d driven down this road a hundred times in the delivery van with the radio on, and he had never once seen it like this. Cars sat abandoned at wrong angles across both lanes, their doors hanging open, one of them still running with its headlights pointed at nothing; a newspaper box had been knocked onto its side, and its pages were drifting slowly down the gutter.

Somewhere a few blocks away, a car alarm was whooping on and on with nobody coming to turn it off. Beneath that, much further off and from many directions at once, was a low, layered sound that Bryan very much did not want to think about, because it sounded an awful lot like moaning.

The main gate to the station stood wide open. Bryan stared at it, then turned and stared, with deep and genuine feeling, back towards the alley he’d just escaped from, where the side gate had been locked so thoroughly that he’d had to climb a wall and kick a dead man in the face.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Now you’re open.”

He went through it anyway, and out into the front courtyard of the Raccoon City Police Department. It had been an art museum once, before the city bought it; Rita had told him that during his first week, with real pride, pointing out the marble and the old stonework and the statue in the main hall. 

Even tonight, it still looked like something a city ought to be proud of. Uneven flagstones stretched across the courtyard to the entrance, worn smooth by decades of boots, and two old-fashioned lamp posts stood guard on either side of the steps, their glass lanterns glowing a weak, sickly yellow through the smoke.

Above the entrance, heavy stone columns framed a sign that read R.P.D. in big, blocky letters, with RACCOON POLICE printed neatly beneath. An American flag hung limp from its pole on the right, and on the left a dark blue city flag drooped in the still, smoky air. Between them sat the front doors: a tall pair of dark green metal doors, panelled and solid, with a small lamp glowing on the wall at either side and a narrower green door tucked away to the right. Off to the right of the courtyard, past a stretch of iron railing, a staircase ran both up and down the side of the building, though from where he stood Bryan couldn’t see where either half of it went.

He didn’t much care, because the lamps by the door were on, and lamps meant people. He jogged across the flagstones and took the short steps two at a time, grabbed both handles, and pulled. The doors didn’t move, so he pushed instead, in case that had been the problem, and they still didn’t move; opting instead to hammer on them with the side of his fist until his scraped palm screamed in protest and the metal boomed hollowly under his hand.

“Hello? Hey! Is anybody in there? I’ve got a delivery!”

When nothing answered, he tried again, louder, and this time his voice cracked halfway through.

“It’s for the evidence room! It’s urgent! Can somebody please just open the door?”

He pressed his ear to the cold metal and heard nothing but his own breathing and, very faintly, something on the other side that might have been footsteps. They were slow and dragging, and they were getting closer. Bryan took his ear off the door and backed away from it until his heels found the edge of the top step, then turned and hurried down the steps again before whatever it was could find the handle.

If the front was locked, he reasoned, there had to be another way in. Buildings like this had back doors, side doors, loading bays, and fire exits, because fire codes said so, and Bryan had never in his life been so grateful for fire codes. He knew there was a fire escape on the east side of the station, a metal staircase bolted to the outside wall, because he'd once watched a group of officers standing on its landing for a cigarette break that was technically against regulations. He had waved at them, and one of them had waved back. It had been a nice moment. Fire escapes, logically, had to lead in as well as out.

He jogged along the front of the building, past the tall pale columns and the dark arched windows, and ducked around the far corner into the narrow lane that ran down the east side. Out here it was quieter, and for a few seconds that felt like a mercy. 

Then, he noticed the light; a deep, pulsing orange glow that was flickering against the brickwork further along, and with it, a smell under the general smell of burning city. It was a sharper, chemical smell, like gasoline and hot metal. He slowed to a walk, then to a creep, and rounded a stack of bins to see where it was coming from.

The fire escape was exactly where he remembered, a steep zigzag of black iron stairs climbing up the side of the building from a small paved yard. At the very top of it, where the last flight met the upper storey, a helicopter had crashed into the wall.

It had come down nose first and driven itself deep into the brickwork, and what was left of it hung half in and half out of the building, its tail jutting out over the yard like a broken bone. The top landing of the fire escape had buckled beneath it and folded down at an angle, its railings twisted into spaghetti. One rotor blade had sheared clean off and lay bent across the paving stones at the foot of the stairs, and the whole wreck was burning. 

Flames were pouring out of the hole it had punched in the wall and licking up the stonework, and black smoke was rolling off it into a sky already thick with smoke. As Bryan stood there watching, something deep inside the cockpit gave a soft, ominous whump, and a shower of sparks came drifting down through the iron steps like orange snow.

He looked at the helicopter, then at the stairs, which led directly up to it, and which were very clearly the way in, then back at the helicopter.

"No," he said, quietly and with total conviction. "Absolutely not. That is going to explode, that is one hundred percent about to explode."

The wreck creaked overhead, long and low, as though it agreed with him.

It was only then, with every fibre of his being already turned to leave, that he noticed the door. It was set into the wall at ground level, just to the left of the bottom flight of stairs and almost hidden in shadow, a sturdy steel door painted the same flaking green as the side gate. 

A small sign beside it read R.P.D. — EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. It was a door at the bottom, he thought, with no stairs, no climbing, and no burning helicopter directly above his head. He could have cried. Instead, he hurried over to it, keeping close to the wall and glancing up at the wreck every second step, and grabbed the handle.

It was chained shut. A thick, rusted chain had been looped through the door's push bar and round a steel bracket bolted into the brickwork, and its ends were held together by a padlock nearly as big as the one on the side gate. Bryan looked at it, took a breath, and then another, and then he very calmly put his forehead against the cold steel of the door and stayed there for a moment while the helicopter crackled and spat somewhere above him.

"What is wrong with this city," he asked the door, "and its locks?"

The door, like the padlock before it, had nothing to say. Bryan straightened up, and that was when the weight dragging down his jacket pocket reminded him it was there.

He took the gun out and held it in front of him in both hands, the way people on TV held them. In movies, the hero simply shot the lock, and the lock exploded into pieces, and the hero walked calmly through the door with a one-liner. It looked easy - it looked, in fact, like the easiest thing in the world. 

He took three big steps back, because he had a vague idea that bullets could bounce, and lined the barrel up with the padlock as best he could, which was to say he pointed it in roughly the right direction and hoped. Then, he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

The noise was enormous. It cracked off the walls of the narrow yard and slammed back into him from every side, and the gun bucked up in his hands so hard he nearly lost it. When he dared to open his eyes, with his ears ringing like a church bell, the padlock was hanging exactly where it had been, completely intact. 

There was a fresh pale gouge in the brickwork a good foot and a half to the left of the door. Overhead, the burning helicopter gave a long, metallic groan, and a piece of something came loose and clanged its way down three flights of iron stairs before bouncing off the paving stones a few feet from his sneakers.

Bryan stared at it, then up at the helicopter, wide-eyed, gun still raised. "I'm sorry," he told it, in a very small voice. "I didn't mean that, please don't."

He did not take a second shot, and partly, that was because something out in the dark had started to moan, and because he had a terrible feeling that the next bullet would go into either his own foot or the fuel tank. Instead he jammed the gun back into his pocket and cast around in a growing panic, and something caught the orange firelight in the shadowy space beneath the bottom flight of stairs. 

Lying in a puddle against the wall, half covered by a fallen tarp, was a pair of bolt cutters. They were the big, heavy-duty kind, nearly as long as his arm, with red rubber handles and rust-spotted jaws, and somebody had left them there and never come back for them.

The only problem was that, to reach them, he would have to go under the stairs, directly underneath the burning helicopter.

Bryan crouched at the edge of the stairwell for a long moment and had a brief, intense negotiation with himself. Then he dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled in at speed, wincing as his scraped palms hit cold, wet concrete and as sparks pattered down through the iron grating above his head. He grabbed the bolt cutters by one handle, dragged them out with a horrible scraping noise, and scrambled backwards out of the stairwell so fast he sat down hard on the paving.

"Oh my God," he breathed, hugging the bolt cutters to his chest alongside the medical bag. "Oh my God, yes. Thank you, whoever you are. Thank you, maintenance guy."

They were heavy and awkward, and it took him two tries just to get the jaws open wide enough to fit around the shackle of the padlock. He braced the bottom handle against his stomach and leaned on the top handle with everything he had, gritting his teeth until his arms shook and his raw palms burned against the rubber grips, glancing up at the helicopter every other second as though it might take the opportunity to finish him off while he was distracted. 

For a long and humiliating moment, nothing happened. Then something gave with a sharp metallic crack, and the padlock dropped into the puddle at his feet with a splash. The chain slithered loose after it, clanking link by link through the push bar until it lay heaped on the ground like a dead snake.

Bryan let the bolt cutters fall with a clatter and threw his weight against the bar. It gave with a loud, rusty groan, and the door swung inward into darkness.

The smell hit him first, and it hit him like a wall. It was thick and coppery, with something sickly sweet underneath, a smell he recognised the same way he'd recognised the stains on Officer Dawson's shirt, without ever having smelled it before. 

Beneath that was something rotten, like meat left out in the sun, and beneath that, absurdly, a faint whiff of burnt coffee, as though some stubborn part of the building were still trying to be an ordinary office. He clapped his sleeve over his nose and mouth and gagged into it, eyes watering.

The emergency lighting was on, bathing everything in a dim, sickly red. He was standing at the bottom of a narrow concrete stairwell, and on the wall beside him, at about the height of a man's shoulder, a long, dark smear ran all the way down to the floor, as though somebody had leaned against the wall there and slid slowly down it. At the bottom of the smear, on the bare concrete, a single police-issue boot lay on its side, still laced. Beyond the stairwell, a short corridor led away into the gloom, its floor scattered with spilled paperwork and long brown streaks that dragged around the corner and out of sight.

Bryan stood in the doorway with his sleeve over his face and the medical bag clutched against his side, and listened. Somewhere deep inside the building, water was dripping. A long way off, something heavy was being dragged across a floor. And close by, so close it might have been just on the other side of the wall, came a slow, wet, contented sound, like somebody eating.

Behind him, the helicopter gave another soft whump and rained a fresh shower of sparks down into the yard. Bryan looked back at it, then forward into the red dark, and made his choice. He let the door swing closed behind him with a quiet and very final click.

"Delivery.." he whispered to nobody, and stepped inside.

The corridor beyond the stairwell was narrow and low-ceilinged, the kind of back-of-house passage that visitors never saw and staff walked down a dozen times a day without ever really looking at. Bryan crept along it with his sleeve pressed over his nose, his free hand trailing along the wall for balance and the medical bag bumping softly against his hip with every step. The red emergency lights stretched his shadow out long and thin ahead of him, and every few paces it lurched across a noticeboard or a closed door in a way that made his heart try to climb out through his throat. 

A poster about workplace hygiene had been torn half off the wall and hung down in a curl, and someone's mug lay smashed on the floor in a dried brown ring of coffee, the words WORLD'S OKAYEST COP printed across its largest piece. Somewhere around the second door, because the silence had become far worse than the sound of his own voice, he started talking to himself in a hoarse and furious whisper.

"This is so stupid," he hissed. "You're so stupid, Bryan, you are an actual idiot. Who's even waiting for this? Seriously, who do you think is sitting in the evidence room right now, checking their watch and wondering where their mystery box is? Nobody, that's who. Half the city's on fire and the other half is eating the first half." He stepped carefully over a scattered spill of case files, eyes darting from shadow to shadow, and gave the bag a resentful look. "You don't even know what's in it. It could be paperclips, it could be someone's lunch, you could be risking your life for a tuna sandwich!"

He hitched the strap higher on his shoulder and winced at the way the torn canvas flapped against his side, then carried on in the same aggrieved whisper as he edged past another door. 

Did anyone even know he was coming? He was fairly sure that nobody at dispatch had looked out of a window before handing him this route, and he could picture Marcy now, chewing her gum and saying the RPD was a nice easy drop and they should give it to the new guy. 

Well, thanks, Marcy. It was eleven-fifty an hour with no dental, and it was so not worth it, and he informed the empty corridor that he was going to write a strongly worded review on a napkin and leave it on Marcy's desk, where she would find it in the morning and feel terrible about herself for the rest of the week.

He was so occupied with composing the napkin in his head that he didn't look down. His sneaker came down squarely in the middle of a dark, glossy pool that had spread out from under a closed office door, and his foot shot out from under him so fast that he didn't even have time to yelp. His leg flew forward and his arms windmilled, and for one long, weightless moment he hung in the air like a cartoon character who had just run off the edge of a cliff. 

Then he came down flat on his back with a splat that echoed the whole length of the corridor, and the air left his lungs in a single loud hoof. Cold wetness soaked through his jacket and his shirt and into the backs of the jeans that had only just begun to dry, and the smell came rushing up around him so thick and coppery that he could taste it at the back of his throat.

For a few seconds he simply lay there in it, staring up at the stained ceiling tiles, before he let out a long and anguished moan and gave up on whispering altogether.

 "Oh, gross. Oh, that is so gross, oh my god, it's warm, why is it still warm?" He lifted one hand out of the puddle and held it up in front of his face, watching it drip, and made a high and despairing noise somewhere at the back of his throat. "That's someone's insides. I'm lying in someone's insides. I'm going to have to burn these clothes, and then I'm going to have to burn myself, and these were my good jeans. These were my only good jeans."

He tried to sit up, but his palm skidded in the blood and dumped him straight back down with another wet slap, which set off a fresh and even louder wave of complaint. He told the ceiling all about his jeans and his landlord and the strongly worded napkin, and about the general unfairness of a universe in which he hadn't even been allowed to finish his iced coffee before the dead started getting up and walking around. He was so thoroughly absorbed in the injustice of it all that he never heard the office door creak open behind his head.

Something leaned out of the doorway above him. It had been a man once, in shirtsleeves and a loosened tie, with an ID lanyard still hanging around its neck, and it moved with a slow, hunched, terrible patience. It swayed there for a moment as its milky eyes rolled down to find the shape lying in the puddle, and then it lunged, grey hands swiping down through the air and snapping shut on the spot where Bryan's shoulder had been half a second earlier. 

By pure blind luck, he had chosen that exact moment to roll onto his side and try getting up a different way, still talking. He was in the middle of announcing that he would be putting in for hazard pay, and that he didn't care whether that was a thing for couriers because he was going to make it a thing, and that he would go down in history as the first courier ever to receive it, and they would name it after him. He had just got one knee under himself, and slipped straight off it again, when something warm and thick and slow landed on the back of his neck.

It wasn't a drop so much as a long, heavy string that touched down on his skin and slid, unhurried, beneath his collar. Bryan froze with one hand flat in the blood. Very slowly, he reached up and touched the back of his neck with his clean hand, and his fingers came away glistening, stringy and faintly yellow. 

He stared at them for a long moment. Then, with enormous reluctance, he tipped his head back and found himself looking straight up into an upside-down grey face, its jaw working and another long, glistening rope of drool already gathering on its lower lip. The zombie groaned at him.

Bryan screamed so loudly that his voice cracked clean in half. He threw himself forward onto all fours and slipped and skidded through the puddle like a newborn deer on ice, and grey fingers raked down the back of his jacket and snagged for one horrible second on the strap of the medical bag before he tore free. 

Then he was up, somehow, and running, with no idea where he was going beyond away. His bloody sneakers squeaked and slithered on the linoleum and left a trail of red footprints behind him as he fled down the corridor and around a corner into a wider hallway lined with closed doors and dark windows, screaming the whole way. Behind him, the zombie stumbled out of the doorway, swayed, caught its balance, and came after him with the dreadful, unhurried confidence of something that had all night.

He didn't see the filing cabinet until he hit it. It was a tall grey four-drawer steel monster that must have toppled over at some point during whatever chaos had swept through the building, and it had fallen sideways across the hallway and wedged itself between the two walls, with its far end propped up on an overturned office chair. 

Bryan ran into it at full tilt. It caught him squarely across the thighs, and his upper half kept on going without the rest of him, so that he folded over the top of it with a hollow, booming clang and an undignified oof while the medical bag swung round and smacked him in the face.

He scrambled back off it, gasping, and looked at it properly. It was too tall to vault, at least with his legs shaking the way they were, and it filled the hallway from wall to wall with no gap at either side. He grabbed the top edge with both bloodied hands, set his feet, and heaved upwards with everything he had, letting out a strangled noise of effort that climbed steadily into a whine. 

The cabinet rocked perhaps a quarter of an inch, gave a long and mocking groan of metal on linoleum, and settled back exactly where it had been. He tried a second time, but his slick hands simply slid off the steel and dumped him on his backside, and as he hit the floor, the moaning rounded the corner behind him.

He spun around. The zombie was coming down the hallway in its loosened tie, its lanyard swinging gently against its chest and the red light gleaming wetly in its open mouth, perhaps twenty feet away and closing, slow and steady, as though it had a meeting to get to and Bryan was on the agenda. 

He looked at it, then back at the filing cabinet, and that was when he noticed the gap. Where the cabinet's far end rested on the toppled office chair, a narrow wedge of dark space opened between its underside and the floor, no more than a foot and a half high at the tallest point and sloping down to nothing. It was absolutely not big enough for a grown man to fit through, and Bryan threw himself flat on his stomach and started crawling anyway.

He shoved the medical bag ahead of him into the gap first and wormed in after it on his elbows. The underside of the cabinet scraped across his shoulder blades and the cold steel pressed down on the back of his head until his cheek was flattened against the filthy floor. His jacket rode up, and the gun in his pocket snagged on something, dragged, and finally came free. 

Dust and old paperclips and god knew what else ground into his blood-soaked front as he went, and he squirmed and kicked and wriggled like a man trying to escape from a sleeping bag that was on fire, muttering through gritted teeth for himself to come on, come on, as he pushed the bag along with one hand and hauled himself forward with the other. Behind him, he heard the zombie's shuffling footsteps stop at the cabinet, and then he felt something brush against the sole of his sneaker.

For one long and truly awful second, Bryan was certain that he was stuck. The cabinet pressed down on his shoulder blades like the hand of God, his hips jammed against the edge of the toppled office chair, and the grey fingers closed around his ankle with a cold, dead strength that went straight through his sock. He kicked backwards with every ounce of panic in his body and felt his heel connect with something soft and yielding. 

The grip loosened just long enough for him to give one last desperate, eel-like heave, and with a long, shrill noise that was dangerously close to a squeal, he popped out from under the far side of the cabinet like a cork from a bottle and slid several feet across the linoleum on his front.

He lay there for a moment, gasping into the floor, and then lifted his head and glanced wildly up and down the hallway. It was empty, thank fuck. He let out a shaky breath and sent up a small, sincere prayer of thanks that nobody, living or dead, had been there to witness that noise, because he wasn't sure his dignity could have survived it, and the night had already taken just about everything else. 

Behind him, the zombie slapped its grey palms against the top of the cabinet and moaned in frustration, and Bryan grabbed the medical bag and scrambled upright before it could think about the gap he'd just come through.

He made it about twenty feet down the hallway, until he turned a corner at a slow jog, with his head turned back over his shoulder, before he walked straight into another one. 

This one had been a police officer. It still wore most of a dark blue uniform, though its shirt had been torn open and its belt hung empty, and it was standing in the middle of the hallway with its back to him, swaying gently, as if it had forgotten what it came in here for. Bryan bounced off it, staggered, and stared at the back of its head in disbelief, and it turned round slowly to look at him with a face that was missing a cheek.

"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me," Bryan said, with real feeling.

The dead officer lunged, and Bryan flailed. There was nothing graceful or deliberate about it; he simply threw the medical bag up between them again, the way he had at the gate, and the zombie's teeth snapped shut on the strap instead of his face. Its grey hands clawed at his shoulders and its weight drove him back into the wall, and for a few frantic seconds the two of them grappled there like a pair of very bad slow dancers. 

Bryan shoved at its chest, and it shoved back. He kneed it, which seemed to annoy only himself. Then he got one hand free and fumbled in his jacket pocket, half sobbing, until his fingers closed around the grip of Officer Dawson's gun. He jammed the muzzle up under the dead man's jaw with his eyes squeezed shut and pulled the trigger.

The shot was deafening in the enclosed hallway. Something wet sprayed across the ceiling, and the zombie's head snapped back, and its whole body went loose and toppled away from him to land flat on the linoleum with a heavy thud.

Bryan stood with his back against the wall and the gun still raised in a trembling double-handed grip, ears ringing, staring down at it. It didn't move. He waited a few seconds longer, just to make sure, and still it didn't move, and a slow, incredulous, completely unhinged grin began to spread across his face.

“Yes,” he breathed. Then, louder, as the adrenaline surged up through him like champagne, he shouted it. “Yes! Oh my God, I got you, I got you! Headshot, motherfucker! That’s what you get! That’s what you get for trying to eat the help!”

He did a small, jerky, entirely involuntary victory dance on the spot, waving the gun around in a way that would have given any firearms instructor a heart attack.

“Who’s the new guy now, huh? Who’s the new guy now? I’m not just a courier; I’m Widowmaker. One shot, one kill, baby! Somebody get me out of Gold, because I am clearly a Grandmaster, they’ve been holding me back this whole ti - ”

The zombie's fingers twitched against the floor. 

Bryan stopped dancing.

Then, with a slow, wet, grinding effort, the dead officer planted both palms on the linoleum and began to push itself back up onto its knees. There was a neat dark hole under its jaw and a great deal less of the top of its head than there had been a minute ago, and none of that seemed to bother it in the least. It raised its ruined face towards him and groaned.

Bryan looked at it. He looked down at the gun in his hand. He looked back up at the zombie, which had now got one foot planted underneath it and was rising with the stubborn patience of a man getting out of a recliner. "No," he said faintly. "No, no, no, that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works, I shot you in the head. That's the rule. Everybody knows that's the rule!"

The zombie, apparently, had never heard of the rule. It stood all the way up, swaying, and took a step towards him.

For one brief, black and utterly exhausted moment, Bryan glanced down at the gun again and seriously considered whether it might be quicker to just save everybody the trouble. Then he pictured Marcy hearing the news, and the strongly worded napkin going unwritten forever, and something stubborn and deeply petty kicked in at the base of his spine. He turned and ran.

The hallway ended ahead of him at a security shutter, a heavy corrugated metal barrier that had been lowered across the passage and then had jammed, or been forced, about two and a half feet off the floor. Beyond it, he could see a sliver of polished marble floor and a much higher, brighter space. 

He dived for it without slowing down, hitting the ground on his stomach for the second time in five minutes, shoved the medical bag through ahead of him, and dragged himself under the shutter in a frantic commando crawl, the bottom edge of the metal scraping along his back and catching briefly on his jacket before letting go. He came out the other side onto cold marble and rolled over, panting, to look back the way he'd come.

The zombie had reached the shutter. It stood on the other side of it for a moment, swaying, its legs visible beneath the edge. Then, with what Bryan could only describe as an air of grim determination, it got down onto its hands and knees and began to crawl under after him.

"Are you serious?" Bryan shrieked. "You're crawling now? Since when do you crawl?"

He scrambled up and looked around wildly for somewhere to go. He had come out into the main hall of the station, the great marble atrium that had once been the heart of the old art museum, and in the red emergency glow it looked like the inside of a cathedral that had been abandoned in a hurry. 

Grand staircases swept up both sides towards the upper gallery, and in the middle of the floor, where Rita had once pointed it out to him with such pride, the statue of the goddess stood on her plinth with her arms raised, entirely indifferent to his problems. Papers were strewn everywhere across the marble, and chairs had been knocked over, and directly in front of him, in the centre of the hall, stood the big curved reception desk, its counter stacked with abandoned paperwork and an overturned cup of pens.

The zombie came out from under the shutter and rose to its feet behind him, and Bryan did the only thing that made sense to him in that moment, which was to put the desk between them.

What followed was the most humiliating three minutes of his entire life, and he had once been dumped at a Chuck E. Cheese's. The zombie came round the left side of the desk, so Bryan went round the right. The zombie reversed direction, so Bryan reversed direction too, skidding on the marble in his bloodstained sneakers. 

They circled, they doubled back, and at one point they stood on opposite sides of the counter staring at each other over a stack of incident reports, both perfectly still, like two cats in a standoff, until the zombie lurched left and Bryan bolted right again. Round and round they went, and the whole time Bryan kept up a running stream of increasingly desperate commentary, his voice bouncing off the marble and echoing up into the gallery.

"Okay, okay, listen, I know we got off on the wrong foot! I'm sorry I shot you! I'm sorry I shot you in the head, that was rude, that was really rude of me, I see that now! But you were trying to eat me, so I feel like we're both a little bit in the wrong here!" He ducked as the zombie made a swipe across the counter, and its grey fingers sent a cascade of paperwork sliding off onto the floor. "Can we not do this? Can we please just not do this? I'm sorry I shot you in the head, please FUCK OFF!"

The zombie did not fuck off. It came round the end of the desk faster than before, almost as though it had learned something, and Bryan spun on his heel to run the other way again. His sneaker came down on one of the sheets of paper the zombie had just swept onto the floor.

It was a single sheet of ordinary printer paper, A4, slightly damp, bearing the heading R.P.D. - LOST PROPERTY CLAIM FORM. On the polished marble under a bloody sole, it might as well have been a sheet of ice. His foot shot out from under him for the second time that night, and Bryan went down hard on his hip with a yelp, the gun skittering away out of his hand across the floor and spinning to a stop somewhere beneath a bench. 

He rolled onto his back just in time to see the zombie loom up over the end of the desk, its ruined head blotting out the red light, its arms reaching down for him and its jaws stretched open far wider than jaws were supposed to go.

He threw his arms up over his face, squeezed his eyes shut, and screamed.

Something slammed into the zombie from the side, and Bryan heard it before he saw it: a heavy, meaty impact, a grunt, and a scuffle of shoes on marble. When he cracked one eye open between his arms, the dead officer was no longer standing over him. It had been knocked sideways off its feet and was sprawled across the floor a few yards away, thrashing, and on top of it was another one. 

This one was wearing a newer, cleaner police uniform than the first, with a dark tactical vest strapped over it and a badge glinting on its chest. It had pinned the dead officer flat with its whole weight, and as Bryan watched, frozen, it lowered its head with a low, rumbling growl and sank its teeth into the other zombie's throat.

Bryan did not move; he stayed exactly where he had landed, flat on his back on the cold marble with one arm still half raised over his face, and he watched. He had seen the dead eat before tonight, or near enough to it: the man behind the dumpster, Officer Dawson with his throat torn open, the shirt-and-tie zombie in the hallway with drool swinging from its lip. Every one of them had fed with the same slow, mindless patience, the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

This was not that. The new one was tearing into the dead officer with a kind of fury, as though the other zombie had personally wronged it, worrying at its throat in short, savage jerks of its head and growling low in its chest like a dog guarding a bone. When the officer's grey hands came up to claw weakly at its vest, it snarled, seized one wrist, and slammed the arm back down against the marble with a crack that echoed all the way up into the gallery.

Then it went straight back to work, and it was not tidy about it. It was angry, messy, and loud; every so often it broke off just long enough to shake its head hard, as though trying to clear water from its ears, before diving back in with renewed enthusiasm. Slowly, very slowly, Bryan lowered his arm and propped himself up on his elbows. He found that he could not look away, no matter how much the sensible part of him wanted to.

"Okay," he murmured, in a small, faraway voice. "Okay.. interesting."

The dead officer's heels skidded uselessly against the floor, and the new zombie bore down on it with a guttural, wet noise. Bryan watched it the way someone might watch a nature documentary in which one lion had unexpectedly turned on another: horrified, transfixed, and with absolutely no idea what he was supposed to take away from it. He heard himself keep talking in the same thin, polite voice, as though narrating it might somehow make it make sense.

"That's, um.. yep. That's a thing you do, apparently; that's a thing that's happening, love that for you."

At last, the dead officer stopped moving. Its hands fell away from the vest and lay open on the marble, its legs went still, and this time there was a finality to its stillness that a bullet to the head had somehow failed to achieve. The other zombie stayed hunched over it for a long moment afterwards, its shoulders rising and falling in a short, ragged rhythm. It took Bryan a few seconds to realise, with a deep and creeping unease, that the thing was panting.

Then it lifted its head, turned, and looked straight at him, and Bryan's whole body went cold.

It had been young once, he thought, and not much older than he was. Its hair was a light, sandy brown, the sort that probably turned golden in the summer, and it fell in a long, untidy fringe across one side of its face, matted at the ends with blood. The skin beneath was pale, though not the dishwater grey of the others; it was a bloodless, waxy pallor, like a church candle, with faint bluish veins showing at the temples and threading down the side of its neck.

The uniform was new R.P.D. issue, or had been, with the creases still pressed into the sleeves. One shoulder had been torn open, the dark tactical vest strapped over it was splashed with fresh blood, and there was a great deal more of it smeared across its mouth and chin, dripping slowly from its jaw onto the marble. The name tag was spattered over and unreadable; the badge above it, however, still glinted bravely in the red light, as though nobody had yet had the heart to tell it.

Its eyes were the strangest part of all. The others had had milky, clouded eyes, like boiled eggs, but these ones were only half clouded: a pale, washed-out blue, like the sky on a cold winter morning. They were filmed over and faint, certainly, but they were still unmistakably blue, and they were fixed on Bryan with an attention that felt horribly, unsettlingly sharp.

The zombie got to its feet, and it did so badly, the way a newborn foal stands up, one leg at a time, with a lurch and a stagger. It swayed over the body of the officer with its hands hanging loose at its sides, and a long shudder ran through it from its shoulders to its knees, so violent that its teeth audibly clicked together. 

Then, it began to stumble towards him. Bryan scrambled backwards on his elbows and the heels of his sneakers until his spine thumped against the base of the reception desk, and he started babbling before he'd even decided to.

"Okay, no, no, no. Hi. Hello. Hey, buddy." He held up both palms, as though that might help. "Great work back there, really, super impressive. Very territorial of you; I respect that, I respect boundaries, and I'm not trying to step on anybody's toes here. I'm not even from here."

The zombie kept coming, unsteady and shuddering, its boots scuffing over the marble. Bryan threw a frantic glance towards the bench where the gun had skidded; it lay well out of reach, a dark shape in the shadows. He looked back up and kept talking, partly because talking was the only weapon he had left, and partly because he wasn't sure he could have stopped if he'd tried.

"Listen, I've had a really long night. I've had a terrible night. I got chased, and I fell in a guy, and someone drooled on me, and I shot a cop in the head, which, by the way, I don't recommend, because it doesn't even work." His voice climbed steadily higher. "And I'm sure you've had a terrible night too, I can see that, I can definitely see that, so maybe we can both just agree to have a less terrible night from now on? I'll go that way, you can go literally any other way, nobody has to eat anybody, and everybody wins. How does that sound?"

The zombie stopped in front of him and sank down into a crouch, so close that their knees almost touched, and Bryan's voice died somewhere in his throat.

Up close, it smelled of blood and smoke and something faintly metallic; beneath all that, absurdly, it smelled of gun oil and cheap aftershave, as though the last thing this man had done with his life was get himself ready for his first day at work. Its breath came out short, cold, and shuddering against Bryan's face. It tilted its head to one side, sandy hair sliding into its eyes, and studied him for a long, long moment.

Bryan stared back with every muscle in his body locked rigid and his heart slamming against his ribs hard enough to hurt. He waited for the teeth; he was quite sure they were coming. Instead, the zombie reached out and touched his jacket.

Its fingers were ice-cold and crusted with drying blood, and they closed on a fold of fabric near his collar and rubbed it slowly between finger and thumb, the way a person might feel a jacket on a rail in a shop. Bryan stopped breathing entirely. The zombie let the fabric go with a small, low noise somewhere in its chest, and moved on to the medical bag that was still clutched against his side.

It prodded the green canvas, then curled one finger into the toothy hole that the first zombie had bitten out of it and gave a tug, as if trying to work out what on earth it was. When Bryan instinctively pulled the bag closer to his chest, it made a sound that was almost, though not quite, a grumble.

"That's, um, that's not for you," Bryan whispered, hugging it tighter. "That's a delivery. I don't know what's in it; it might be a tuna sandwich, for all I know. Either way, you can't have it. Sorry, company policy."

The zombie's pale eyes drifted up from the bag to his face, and then a little higher, settling on something just above his head. Before Bryan could work out what it was looking at, it reached up with one slow, bloodied hand and touched the pom-pom on top of his beanie. It gave it a careful little squeeze, then batted at it gently so that it bobbed, and watched it bob with every appearance of total fascination; and then, having apparently enjoyed that very much, it did it again.

Bryan sat there against the reception desk, covered in blood and drool and floor dust, in the middle of a dead city's police station, with a zombie in a police uniform crouched in front of him playing with his hat. He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this: not orientation, not the laminated handbook, and certainly not anything else that had happened tonight.

"What," he said at last, very faintly, "the fuck."

The zombie squeezed the pom-pom one final time. Its cloudy blue eyes slid back down to meet his, and it let out a long, low, rattling sigh.

The zombie sat crouched in front of him, swaying very slightly on its heels, its pale eyes drifting every few seconds back up to the top of Bryan's head as if it were waiting for the pom-pom to do something else interesting. 

Bryan, for his part, sat pressed against the reception desk and tried to make his brain produce a single useful thought, and found that the only one it could come up with was deeply, profoundly stupid.

He reached up, slowly, and pulled the beanie off his head.

The zombie's eyes followed it all the way down. Bryan held it out in front of him at arm's length, the way he might have offered a treat to a strange dog, with the pom-pom dangling from his fingers and his static-frizzed hair standing up in every direction. His hand was shaking so badly that the pom-pom trembled.

"Here," he whispered. "You can have it, it's fine. It's, um, it's a gift. A peace offering. You keep the hat, I keep my face, and we call it even. Deal?"

The zombie stared at the hat, then it stared at Bryan, and then back at the hat again, its head tilting slowly to one side, as though the concept of being given something had arrived from a very long way off and was taking a while to land. 

At last it reached out, one cold, bloodied finger at a time, and closed its hand around the beanie. It drew it in carefully towards its chest and held it there in both hands, turning it over, pressing the soft knit between its fingers, and giving the pom-pom another experimental little squeeze; and Bryan, watching all of this from about two feet away, felt something in his chest do a small, confused somersault.

"Okay," he breathed. "Okay, good. That's great, we're doing great."

Emboldened, and slightly hysterical, he cleared his throat and tried again. The zombie hadn't eaten him yet, after all, which put it well ahead of every other dead thing he'd met tonight, and it had saved him, sort of, if he squinted at it. That had to count for something.

"So," he said, with the forced brightness of a man making small talk at a funeral. "Hi. I'm Bryan. I'm a courier; I deliver stuff. I'm guessing you're, um, a cop? Were a cop? Are a cop? I don't actually know what the rules are here."

The zombie looked up from the beanie. Its jaw worked, slowly, and its lips parted, and for one wild and wonderful second Bryan genuinely thought it was going to answer him. A sound came out of its throat: a low, dry rasp, like air being pushed through a rusted pipe. It tried again, brow furrowing in visible effort, and managed something that might have been the beginning of a consonant before the whole thing collapsed into a wet, frustrated gurgle and a sharp shake of the head. It closed its mouth and glared at the floor, clutching the beanie tighter, and looked, for all the world, embarrassed.

"Hey, no, that's okay," Bryan said quickly, holding up his hands. "That's totally okay. Talking's overrated. I talk way too much, honestly; everyone says so. You don't have to talk."

His gaze dropped, almost by habit, to the name tag on the tactical vest, still spattered over with blood. Before he could think better of it, he leaned in, licked his thumb, and rubbed at the worst of the stain. The zombie went very still under his hand and made no move to stop him, and under the smear, slowly, the letters emerged in neat white type: L. KENNEDY.

"L. Kennedy," Bryan read aloud. He sat back on his heels, feeling oddly triumphant. "Okay. Okay, that's a start. Kennedy, like the president, very patriotic, and the L is for.." He squinted at the zombie's face as though the answer might be written on it somewhere. "Larry?"

The zombie stared at him. Then, slowly and with great deliberation, it shook its head.

"Not Larry. Okay, fair, you don't look like a Larry. Lewis?" Another shake. "Logan? Lance? Lucas?" The zombie shook its head at each of them, a little more firmly every time, and on Lucas it actually let out a short, offended grunt. Bryan winced. "Okay, sorry, not Lucas, got it. Lebron?"

This time the zombie didn’t even bother shaking its head. It just looked at him, flatly, for a very long moment, in a way that made Bryan feel as though a dead man had just been personally disappointed in him.

"Yeah, no, that one was a reach," he admitted. "I panicked."

He rattled through a few more for good measure: Lenny, Lyle, Lloyd, and, in a moment of pure desperation, Lancelot. Each one earned another weary shake of the sandy head. Eventually Bryan dragged both hands down his face, smearing a fresh streak of somebody else's blood across his cheek in the process, and let out a long groan.

"Okay, this isn't working," he said. "There are, like, a million names that start with L. We could be here all night, and I really, really don't want to be here all night. So, new plan." He sat up straighter and held up a finger, the way he'd seen people do at parties. "Charades, sort of. You know charades? I ask questions, you nod for yes, shake for no. Easy, okay?"

The zombie considered this, and, after a pause, it nodded once.

"Great! Okay! Communication!" Bryan beamed at it, absurdly proud of them both. "First question. Is your name long? Like, more than five letters?" A shake. "Less than five?" Another, slightly slower shake. Bryan frowned, counting on his fingers. "So five?" A shake. "Four, then. It's four letters?"

The zombie nodded, and Bryan sucked in a sharp breath, as if he'd just been handed the winning lottery numbers.

"Four letters, starts with L. Okay. Okay, we're close. Is it Liam?" A shake. "Luke?" Another. "Leif? Like the Viking guy?" A shake, with what was very possibly an eye roll attached; it was difficult to tell, with the clouding. Bryan pressed on, undeterred. "Okay, okay. Is the second letter an E?"

The zombie nodded.

"L-E, four letters." Bryan's lips moved silently as he ran through the possibilities, and then he brightened. "Lewi - no, that's five. Le.. Lee.." He snapped his fingers. "Leon? Is it Leon?"

The zombie went very still. Then it nodded, slowly and firmly, and its pale blue eyes fixed on Bryan's face with something that looked startlingly like relief. It made another sound in its throat, softer this time, almost a hum, and the hands holding the beanie tightened around it.

"Leon," Bryan repeated, and he let out a breathless, delighted laugh that echoed up into the dark gallery. "Leon Kennedy! Oh my god, we did it. We did it! Hi, Leon, nice to meet you, Leon. I'm Bryan, like I said, and I'm really glad you didn't eat me, Leon."

Leon looked at him for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he lifted the beanie in both hands and pulled it down onto his own head, crooked and lopsided, with the pom-pom flopping over to one side and his blood-matted fringe sticking out from underneath it.

For a little while afterwards, the main hall was almost peaceful. Bryan sat cross-legged on the marble in front of the reception desk, with the medical bag in his lap and the gun retrieved from under the bench and tucked back into his pocket, and Leon crouched opposite him in the lopsided beanie, his head tilted and his pale eyes following every movement of Bryan's hands. 

The red emergency lights hummed overhead. Somewhere outside, the car alarm had finally given up, and for the first time since the dumpster, Bryan's heart had slowed to something that could reasonably be described as a heartbeat.

So, naturally, he started talking again.

"So, Leon," he said, conversationally, as if they were sitting across from each other in a diner. "Leon Kennedy, Officer Kennedy. How long were you a cop, before all this? Because, no offence, you look really new. Like, the uniform still has the creases new." He gestured vaguely at Leon's sleeve. "Was this, like, your first week? Please don't tell me this was your first day. That would be the worst first day in the history of first days, and I say that as someone who once got locked in a walk-in freezer on my first day at Dairy Queen."

Leon looked down at his own sleeve, then back up at Bryan, and made a small, rough sound that might have been a yes or might have been nothing at all. Bryan decided to take it as a yes.

"Oh, buddy," he said, with genuine sympathy. "Oh, that sucks."

He was opening his mouth to ask something else, though he would never afterwards remember what, when the sound came from upstairs.

It was a single, enormous boom, deep enough that Bryan felt it in his teeth before he heard it, as though something very large and very heavy had just been dropped onto the floor above them from a great height. A fine sifting of plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling and settled in the red light like snow. Bryan froze with his mouth still half open; across from him, Leon's head snapped up towards the gallery so fast that the pom-pom on his beanie swung.

Then came another boom, and another after that, slow and even and measured. They were footsteps, Bryan realised, with a cold, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were the footsteps of something that weighed far more than any person had any business weighing, walking unhurriedly across the floor somewhere above the east side of the hall, and every one of them rattled the glass in the old museum display cases along the walls.

Leon was on his feet before Bryan had even finished the thought. He staggered backwards a step, then two, nearly tripping over the body of the dead officer behind him; his whole frame had gone rigid, his shoulders hunched up towards his ears, and the shudder that ran through him now was nothing like the slow, twitching ones from before. It was sharp and violent and unmistakable, and even with his face as pale and slack as it was, there was no mistaking the look in his eyes for anything other than fear.

Bryan stared up at him. "What?" he said. "What is it? What's wrong with you?"

Leon lurched forward, grabbed a fistful of Bryan's jacket with one cold hand, and pulled. It was not gentle; it nearly yanked Bryan off the floor, and the medical bag slid out of his lap and thumped against the marble.

"Hey - hey! Whoa, okay, ow, what are you doing?" Bryan scrabbled for the bag with one hand and tried to pry Leon's fingers off his collar with the other, and got absolutely nowhere with either. "Leon, buddy, use your words, or, okay, no, you can't, sorry, but use your something!"

Above them, the footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was somehow far worse than the noise had been, and Bryan felt every hair on his arms stand up beneath his sleeves.

Leon made a sound. It was a strangled, urgent noise, low in his throat, and he tried again immediately, jaw working with frantic effort. What came out was a scrape of broken consonants, a hard g and a hiss and something that could have been the start of an o, nothing that came within shouting distance of a word, and he shook his head furiously, as if the failure had physically hurt him, and tugged at Bryan's jacket again, harder. His wide, clouded eyes darted from Bryan's face to the gallery and back, again and again.

That, more than anything, was what finally got through to Bryan. He had watched this zombie tear another zombie apart with its teeth, without hesitation, like it was nothing at all. If something upstairs could make that look scared, then Bryan did not want to meet it. He did not want to see it, or hear it, or be in the same building as it for one single second longer than was strictly necessary.

"Okay," he said, and his voice came out high and thin. "Okay, okay, okay, I get it, I get it. Big scary thing. Bad, very bad. We're leaving. Where are we going? Which way? Leon, which way?"

The footsteps started up again: boom, boom, boom, louder now and closer, moving along the upper floor towards the head of the east staircase. Leon let go of Bryan's jacket at last and turned, stumbling away across the marble in his loose, lurching gait, around the statue and towards the wide stone staircase on the opposite side of the hall. 

He went up the first few steps clumsily, catching himself on the banister, and then stopped and looked back over his shoulder with the crooked beanie slipping down over one eye. He made another low, insistent sound, and jerked his head towards the stairs.

Bryan hesitated. He crouched at the foot of the reception desk with the torn medical bag clutched against his chest and Officer Dawson's gun weighing down his pocket, and he looked from the zombie on the staircase to the dark gallery overhead, where the footsteps were getting louder by the second. 

Every sensible part of him was pointing out that following a dead man up a flight of stairs into a pitch-black police station was, by any reasonable measure, the worst idea he had ever had in his entire life, and that he had already had quite a lot of bad ideas tonight.

Boom. Plaster rained down from the ceiling. Boom.

"This is so not worth it," Bryan whispered, to nobody at all, as he scrambled to his feet, slung the bag over his shoulder, and ran after him.