[44] The Way to Recover Mana

"Left! Take the alley!"

The boy at the front barked the order without looking back, his dark hair swept off his forehead and plastered there with sweat. Alan. I had already seen what waited on the main road, a bus slewed across both lanes with shapes shuffling between its wheels, and I turned with him. A fallen road sign lay across the mouth of the alley. I ducked under it as the others scrambled past.

"Behind us!"

"I know!"

A cluster of infected poured around the corner, tripping over one another in their hurry. The girl with the messy red twin tails spun on her heel and swung her baseball bat into the nearest skull. Maki. The infected folded at the knees.

"Keep moving!" Alan shouted.

I put my forearm into the next one’s shoulder and shoved. The rolled magazines taped beneath my sleeve took the grab meant for my wrist, paper tearing, and then my steel bar caught it across the temple and it dropped. I backed into the alley after them. The morning light thinned and died between the buildings.

"Ahh!"

The smallest of them had stumbled over a split bin bag, black hair hanging untidily around her glasses, oversized sleeves flapping as she scrabbled backwards. Nadia. An infected had its hand around her ankle.

"Back away!"

The boy with the cropped bleached hair got there first. His pale eyes were fixed on the infected as he swung. The pipe hit its chest hard enough to lift its feet off the ground. It flew backwards, cracked its head against the wall and slid down in a heap. Teucer.

"T-Thank you!"

"Get up, quick."

"Sorry!"

He seized her hand and hauled her upright, dragging her with him deeper into the alley. I took the rear, glancing back each time another shape lurched too close. As I passed the one he had struck, a patch of pale blue frost caught my eye, spread across its chest where the pipe had landed. Crystals glittered over the rotting flesh.

Frost Breath. That was what Teucer had called his ability. Unreal.

A snarl rang out behind me, too close. I spun and drove my padded forearm into the nearest infected, shoving it back into the ones behind it, then turned to run.

We couldn't stop running. We've been on the move since the break of dawn. From Rivermere we had crossed three districts on foot, and this was Selborne Park, all low shophouses and shuttered storefronts. The infected were everywhere here too. They came out of doorways and from under parked cars. We were avoiding confrontation whenever we could. Stopping to incapacitate a few of them was a fool's errand. Maki’s face had flickered with fire twice since sunrise and gone out both times. Alan didn't even try with his.

Then... behind us, something gurgled. Wet and bubbling, like a drain trying to clear itself.

"Spitter!" Maki shouted with a frown.

From that name, I knew it was another one of those. A mutant zombie.

I couldn't help but glance back. I saw its putrid appearance.

The Spitter stood at the mouth of the alley, hunched so low its knuckles brushed the ground. The flesh of its neck was swollen tight and shiny. Its jaw hung wide and inhuman, the skin at the corners split and weeping. As I watched, its throat bulged outwards like a bullfrog’s.

"Mister, dodge!" A girl shouted. Nadia? Maki? It didn't matter. I moved almost on instinct, throwing my entire body to the side. The spray went over my shoulder in a pale, glistening sheet and struck the bin where Nadia had fallen. The plastic hissed and slumped. Where the fluid ran onto the concrete, it smoked and bit into the surface, leaving a pitted, bubbling scar.

"Acid...?!"

"Don’t give it a straight line!" Alan called from ahead. “Leave it to Teucer, Mr Ramesh. Run!”

"Shit," Teucer muttered. He turned and planted his feet in the middle of the alley, facing the creature, and his eyes flicked once towards me, then down to Nadia. Take her.

My legs had already decided. The moment Alan said to leave it to Teucer, my knees loosened with a relief so plain it shamed me. I had watched infected come over barricades. I had lain behind a locked door for hours listening to them scrape at it, and I knew that fear well enough to live beside it. But this... this was something else.

A grown man does not leave children alone. But as the Spitter’s throat swelled for another attack, I began to feel regret in my decision last night. Nadia was still on her knees in the spilled rubbish, staring at the scar the acid had left beside her hand. I caught her by the sleeve and hauled her up. It was damp and shaking in my fist.

"Come on."

Nadia ran at my elbow, and I dragged her along until the alley bent and the wall cut off my view. Then I heard Teucer breathe in.

It was a long, ragged pull of air, and it ended in a sound like a kettle just before it boils.

I caught a glimpse as I ran with Nadia.

White mist rolled out of his mouth and met the Spitter’s spray halfway. The pale fluid clouded and stiffened in the air and fell as a spatter of grey shards that rang off the concrete. The cold did not stop there. It crawled up the jet to its source and over the swollen jaw, and the wet gurgle choked into a crackle. Frost ran down the neck, across the hunched shoulders, along both arms. The creature tried to lunge. Its knuckles locked to the ground. In a few seconds it was a lump of white-rimed meat with its mouth stuck open and a spike of ice jutting from its throat.

Teucer stood in front of it, panting.

"Teucer!" Nadia pulled against my grip.

He turned. He took one step towards us and his knee gave. He caught the wall with his shoulder, and I heard the noise he made when he tried to breathe, a thin whistle that stopped halfway and started again. His free hand clawed at the front of his sweater. His lips had gone a colour I did not like.

"I’m fine," he rasped.

He was not. Behind him the ice over the Spitter’s neck gave a small, dry crack, and past its frozen bulk I saw the street fill with movement. Infected. Not one or two. They came round the corner in a tangle of arms and torn clothes, and the first of them hit the Spitter’s back and shoved against it. The ice held. The thing did not topple, so the others piled up behind it, and I could hear their feet, a hundred ragged slaps on wet concrete, getting closer.

I let go of Nadia and went back for him. My ankle flared with every stride, hot and sullen, and I welcomed it. I turned my back to Teucer and crouched.

"Get on."

"Wha...? No... haah... Pi... ss off... old man."

It didn't look good.

"Stop talking, boy. We don't have time to argue."

"..."

Nadia pushed Teucer from behind, and he fell across my back with his arms looped loosely round my neck. He weighed less than he should have, all elbows and sharp bone. His breath rattled wet and fast beside my ear.

"Slow," I said. "In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don’t talk."

"Shut... up."

This boy was extremely stubborn... just like Krishna.

I stood and hooked my right arm under his knee. Behind us the Spitter’s ice cracked again, louder, and an infected squeezed past its shoulder, hands first, mouth open. Then another.

"Mr Ramesh!" Alan was at the far end of the alley with Maki beside him. "Keep coming! Don’t stop, keep coming straight at us!"

I ran. It was not a run, really. It was a lurch, a boy’s weight dragging at my neck, my bar swinging uselessly in my left hand. The slap of feet behind me had turned into a roar of bodies.

Nadia ran at my elbow, one hand hovering at Teucer’s sleeve. The alley floor was littered with split bin bags and flattened cardboard, and just before the end a skip stood against the wall, stuffed to the lip with more of it. Alan was already crouching beside it.

"Past us!" he shouted.

I went between them with my shoulder scraping brick. Behind me Alan drove both fists into the skip, and the cardboard caught slowly, then all at once.

"Maki!"

She was already there. Fire crawled across the left side of her face, and she kicked the skip over onto its side. It slid across the mouth of the alley and spilled burning rubbish from wall to wall. Smoke rolled out thick and low.

The first infected hit it at a run and suddenly seemed to lose its senses. It reared back with its jacket smouldering and clawed at the air in front of its face, then at the wall, then at the infected behind it. The ones at its back piled in and went the same way, heads jerking, arms swinging at nothing, turning on one another as if the smoke had swallowed everything that smelled or sounded like us. 

"Go!" Alan said.

His fists had gone out. He swayed on his feet, and Maki’s face was already dark again. She wiped her cheek with the back of her sleeve and looked at the smear of soot, grim-faced.

So fire could confuse the infected. At the very least, it was enough to stall their advances.

Out of the alley the street opened into low shophouses and shuttered storefronts. We took the first turning and the next. The roar behind us thinned to a murmur, then to nothing I could separate from my own breathing. Alan led, and Maki fell in at my side, and Nadia was still at my elbow with her hand hovering at Teucer’s sleeve.

His breathing rasped against my neck and slowly steadied.

Nothing followed us after that. Laundry poles jutted from the upper windows with rags still hanging from them, and somewhere a shutter rattled in the wind.

Alan finally slowed at the back of a long, low building with a rusted loading bay. The roller shutter had jammed a metre off the ground, and faded lettering over the door read WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTION. He crouched, peered under it, and jerked his head.

I lowered Teucer to his feet. He swayed, scowled at me without a gesture of appreciation. Not that I wanted any.

"In here," Alan affirmed. "This is the place."

This kid said so naturally. He had not looked at a sign or tried the shutter. Since leaving the alley he had taken every turning without a pause, and I had been too occupied to wonder why. I thought of the night before, in the maintenance room. The unanimous decision to come to this place as their next hideout. What right had I to tell a kid that his plan was full of problems, when I had no plan of my own?

Now the shutter hung a metre off the ground in front of me, with the lettering over it exactly where he had said it would be.

Was this some kind of ability too?

I had too many questions.

Alan was already crouching at the gap, waiting for the others. We crawled through one by one, and I went last, dragging my bar. Inside it was dim and dry and smelled of cardboard. Pallets of tinned goods stood in towers under a skin of dust. There were crates of bottled water, cartons of instant noodles, a stack of blankets still wrapped in plastic.

"We've hit the jackpot..." Nadia gasped.

A crazy stroke of luck.

A tin hissed open.

The sound dragged me up awake. For a few seconds I did not know where I was. Cardboard, dust, the cold weight of the bar across my thighs. Then it all came back... I must have passed out from exhaustion.

I turned my wrist and squinted at my watch. Nine in the morning. I had sat down against a crate to rest my leg, and an hour had gone.

Teucer lay curled on a pile of blankets by the pallets with his pipe still in his fist, his mouth open, and a rasp in his breath I could hear from across the room. Nadia sat cross-legged between two crates with a tin of peaches in her lap, working the ring pull as gently as she could. She caught my eye and froze, apologetic.

"Sorry," she whispered. "It’s loud."

"It’s fine."

My eyes went past her.

Alan had gone down against the far wall with his head tipped back and his jacket bunched under his neck. He had not even taken his shoes off. Beside him Maki had fallen asleep sitting up, her cheek against his shoulder, and her hand had found his in the dust between them. She was holding it the way a child holds a rail on a moving train. Her eyelashes appeared clumped from crying. Neither of them stirred.

A sight so familiar, precious. I looked away from it, and back to my surroundings.

Water, noodles, tins, blankets, and a hiding place that hadn't been looted. 

It would last us for a long time.

"Nadia."

"Yes?"

"...Can Awakened... see the future?"

The girl stopped with the peach tin halfway to her mouth. I had kept my voice low and flat, the way you ask a stranger for the time. She blinked at me through her glasses.

"Of course not. I mean... if there's someone out there like that, it might be possible. We've not met them yet."

Hmm.

"Then how did Alan know where to find this place?"

"...Oh." Her eyes dropped to the tin, and she pulled her sleeves further over her hands. "That’s... Mama."

I waited.

"We all... dream of her. Not every night, but a lot. It’s a warm room, and everything is white at the edges so I can’t see much of it. She’s there, and she talks to us." Her voice dropped lower, and she glanced at Alan before she went on. "Mine are mostly just that. But Alan’s are different. He wakes up knowing."

"Like... the future?"

Nadia shook her head. "It's..." She hunted for the words, rubbing a thumb along the rim of the tin. "It’s not Alan who sees the future, Mr Ramesh. ...It’s Mama who sees it."

Mama, huh.

I looked up at the ceiling, and sighed. How much of this was I supposed to believe?

"Mr Ramesh."

Nadia held out the peach tin. I took it, and the syrup was so sweet it hurt my teeth.

My eyes drifted across the room again.

"Is he having one of those dreams now?"

"Probably," Nadia said.

She looked at Alan, then back at me. "Mr Ramesh... if you could see Mama in your dream, what would you ask her?"

What would I ask her?

Whether she was a god? Or something pretending to be one? If she truly was some kind of omniscient being who had given these children powers, then I would ask if the dead walking our streets were some punishment meant for mankind. Whether there was a reason behind all of this, or if we had simply brought it upon ourselves.

What was the purpose of our existence, now that the dead walking amongst the living?

I lowered the tin.

Before I could answer, Alan stirred.

Maki’s hand tightened in his, then slipped free as he sat up. She blinked awake, hair flattened on one side, and squinted at him.

"Alan?"

The boy did not answer, but he was clearly smiling. With the eyes of someone who had been walking in the dark for a long time and had finally seen a light.

"She told me," he began with an excited breath.

Nadia sat up straighter, as if she was waiting for something.

"...The way to recover our abilities." His voice cracked on the last word, and he laughed, short and breathless, like a man surprised to hear himself. "Our mana. There’s somewhere we can get it back."

"S-Seriously?" Maki was fully awake now, gripping his sleeve. "Seriously?!"

"Yeah... finally... we'll have a fighting chance."

Across the room, Teucer had stopped breathing so loudly. He lay on the blankets with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

"Where?"

Alan sat forward with his elbows on his knees. "East of here. We keep following the main road until it crosses a canal, then there’s a footbridge with a red railing. Past that the road opens into a wide car park, and there’s a building at the end of it. It’s huge. Glass at the front, mostly smashed." He pressed his thumb into his palm as if to feel the shape of it. "There’s a fountain in the atrium. A staircase that goes up in a spiral. That's where we need to go."

I knew the building before he finished. I had sat at a folding table in the Rivermere subway camp and listened to a trader with a ruined voice swear he would never go near it again. A shopping mall past the canal. The first week, half the district had run there because it had food and doors that locked. Bodies kept piling like lambs to a slaughter. After that, it had grown into a nest of undead. He had called it a graveyard.

"That’s Selborne Square," I muttered.

Alan looked at me. "You know it?"

"I think... it's best for you kids not to go there."

He did not answer straight away. His eyes stayed on my face, reading my expression.

"...Is it... that bad?"

"Hundreds went in." I kept my voice level. "No one came out."

It might be harsh but...

"Without your powers, you wouldn't even make it to the entrance."

Maki’s hand had slid down from his sleeve. Nadia pulled her knees in. Nobody spoke, and in the quiet I could hear the water dripping somewhere beyond the pallets.

Alan looked down at his palms. I watched him turn the idea over. He was not a fool. As the leader of the group, he must've had a good head on his shoulders. If he took my warning seriously, I knew he would weigh the lives of three people properly.

"Thank you, Mr Ramesh." He lifted his head, and the fear was plainly there in his eyes, and so was the decision.

"But if we don't go, we'll meet our end eventually."

"Kid... you can't be serious."

"We have to try. We have to take the chance."

Nobody answered him. Maki nodded first, and Nadia followed. Teucer’s silence meant everything.

Why did these kids think so radically? There had to be a group who would take them in, even with mutants trailing after them. I had heard of people who called themselves the Garden, gathering and supporting survivors. If we just asked...

...No. Nobody would open a door to children with that following them. I... see now. I had no better answer to give them. When it came down to it, the mutants were after them, not me.

"...Then you go," I finally declared. "I’ll stay."

I felt disgust at myself having said that, plain and physical. It sat under my tongue.

And still, some stubborn, foolish part of me had been waiting for them to dissuade their leader from that foolish decision. But clearly, I had always been an outsider who did not share their plights.

Alan only nodded, slowly, and the light in his face dimmed a little.

"Mr Ramesh..." Nadia started.

"I’m not a fighter." I made myself say the rest. "In there... I’d be one more body you’d have to step over."

That declaration came out smaller than I wanted. Alan did not nod this time. He only held my eyes a moment longer than was comfortable, and I did not look away.

"Thank you, Mr Ramesh."

A thank you that carried several meanings.

Then he turned to the others. Maki, Nadia, Teucer. He looked at each of them in turn, and his voice, when it came, was steady and firm.

"We’ll rest first, prepare well, and leave at noon. Whatever it takes, we all come back. Alive."

"I’ll get something to eat," I said, and stood before anyone could answer. My ankle pulled at me as I went. "Don’t mind me."

Nobody did. Maki was dragging blankets towards the pallets, and Alan was tying the last of the tins into a bundle. Behind them came the rip of packing tape, Alan saying "Forearms first" as he wrapped new magazines round Maki’s arm, and the scrape of a shelf bracket being sharpened on concrete. Teucer tossed it to Nadia, who nearly dropped it. "Hit with the corner, not the flat."

I did not look any longer. I sat down on a stack of flattened cartons with my back to the concrete and set a can on my knee.

Krishna, my son.

I looked at my hands. The right one still carried the indent of the steel bar.

Did I make the right decision?

The warehouse gave no answer, and then the noon light had crept in under the shutter and laid a pale stripe across the floor.

"Mr Ramesh?"

I came back to myself with the can still unopened on my knee. Alan stood at the end of the aisle with his bundle on his back, and Nadia hovered behind him, the sharpened bracket held awkwardly in both hands. I did not know how long they had been calling.

"We’re heading out," Alan said. He was smiling, and it was an effort I could see. "Hold the fort for us, okay?"

"We’ll be back before dark," Nadia added, and smiled too, small and quick, as if she were the one trying to reassure me.

"...Be careful," I said. It was all I had.

They went. I stayed seated and listened to their footsteps cross the floor, then the scrape of bodies sliding under the shutter, one after another. Maki’s voice, low. Teucer’s pipe clinking against the concrete. Then the last pair of shoes, and the shutter shook once as someone let go of it.

Silence came back into the building like water into a pipe.

I was alone with the dust, the tins and the thin line of daylight, and the can on my knee had gone warm in my hand.