The loading bay door lurched inward at the bottom, the warped frame giving another inch, and through the gap came the smell, that specific smell that Michael’s brain had catalogued in the first week and never stopped recognising, and with it the sound of the horde pressed against the outside of the building, a continuous low roar that had no beginning and no end, just pressure.

The leader looked at his two women at the back of the group, then looked at his men and the door.

"Move," he said.

---

Maya led the way and Michael let her because she was already three steps ahead of everyone else in terms of knowing where they were going.

She went down the central corridor at a pace that was fast without being panicked, reading the building as she moved, her eyes going up to the ceiling supports and across to the wall joints with the automatic assessment of someone who couldn’t turn it off even now.

The mezzanine access staircase was where she said it would be, at the far end of the warehouse floor behind a set of heavy shelving units, a metal staircase bolted to the interior wall leading up to a supervisor platform that ran the full width of the building above the storage floor.

Safety railing on three sides, solid metal decking, a small supervisor office enclosed at one end with a window overlooking the floor below.

"Up," Michael said and they went up.

Sera got the two women from the leader’s group moving when they hesitated, not roughly but with the particular directed energy she had when things needed to happen faster than people were making them happen. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

The chain man went up. The two bat men went up. The fifth man went up. The leader went up last and Michael went after him and turned at the top and looked down at the staircase.

"Help me with this," he said to the chain man.

The man looked at him for a second and then looked at the loading bay door which had given another two inches at the bottom and through the gap was visible now, the press of things outside, and he put his chain down and grabbed the staircase railing beside Michael and they pulled.

The staircase was bolted but the bolts were old and the metal was tired and between the two of them and Sera adding her weight from the top it came away from the wall with a sound like a gunshot that echoed through the whole warehouse and they dragged it up onto the mezzanine and laid it flat on the decking.

Twelve feet of empty air between the mezzanine edge and the warehouse floor below.

Michael looked over the railing.

The loading bay door came in thirty seconds later.

---

It didn’t fall, it folded, the bottom warping inward under sustained pressure until the mechanism failed entirely and the whole thing buckled and the horde came through the gap it left in a continuous pour that had no shape, just mass, Rotters compressed against each other by the weight of more Rotters behind them spilling into the warehouse floor with the particular sound of a thing that had been held back and wasn’t anymore.

Michael watched from the mezzanine railing and counted and stopped counting because counting wasn’t useful information at this scale.

The warehouse floor filled.

Not instantly, it took maybe two minutes, but steadily and without pause, the horde spreading across the storage floor and between the shelving units and into the corridor and against the walls, and the sound of it was something he hadn’t heard before, not the ambient groaning of the city or the shuffle of individual Rotters in a hallway but something continuous and layered that sat in the chest like pressure.

Maya was beside him at the railing, both hands gripping it, looking down with wide eyes that were processing what they were seeing with the focused attention she applied to everything even when what she was seeing was this.

"There are hundreds of them," she said quietly.

"More," Michael said.

Shin was on his other side and she didn’t say anything, just looked down at the floor below with the steady composure she maintained even when it clearly cost her something to maintain it.

Sera had positioned herself back from the railing and was watching the leader’s group with the particular attention she gave to threats she hadn’t finished assessing yet. The leader was at the far end of the mezzanine looking down at the horde with his handgun in his hand and his jaw tight and whatever he’d been planning to do with that handgun forty minutes ago was clearly somewhere else in his mind right now.

His two women were sitting on the decking against the supervisor office wall with their knees pulled up and their eyes down and Michael looked at them and then looked away because that was a conversation for when they weren’t standing on a metal platform above several hundred Rotters.

The chain man appeared beside Michael at the railing. He looked down for a long moment.

"We’re stuck," he said. It wasn’t a question.

"For now."

"For now," the man repeated like he was testing the weight of it. "How long is for now."

Michael pulled up the pulse and looked at the density of signatures filling the warehouse floor and extending out into the street beyond and ran the numbers with the particular focused calm that the system encouraged, everything becoming logistics when you had a blueprint interface running in your vision and a shop with two thousand SP in it.

"Hordes move," he said. "They don’t stay. Something drew them here and when that something stops drawing them they’ll drift." He paused. "The question is what drew them and whether it’s still active."

The chain man looked at him. "You talk like you know things."

"I know some things," Michael said.

From below something large moved through the horde with enough mass to displace the Rotters around it and Michael tracked it on the pulse and felt the particular weight of it and looked at the warehouse floor until he found it, a shape moving through the crowd below that was bigger than everything around it, shoulders above the Rotter mass, the bone plate growths of a Brute visible even from the mezzanine height.

"That," Michael said, nodding down at it.

Everyone at the railing looked.

The Brute moved through the horde as the Rotters parted around it without it seeming to notice them. It had probably been drawing the horde behind it for blocks, the kind of Apex adjacent threat that acted as an unconscious anchor for the things around it.

"If that thing leaves the building the horde follows it," Michael said.

"And if it doesn’t," Sera said from behind him.

"Then we figure something else out."

The leader had come to the railing and was looking at the Brute below with the expression of someone updating a threat assessment in real time. "I’ve seen those before," he said. "Three of my people tried to take one down in the first week." A short pause that said everything about how that had gone. "You can’t fight that."

"Not conventionally," Michael said.

The leader looked at him sideways. "What does that mean."

Michael was already looking at the warehouse layout in the Blueprint Interface overlay, mapping the structural points, the shelving unit positions, the cold storage bays, the ceiling mounted loading crane that ran on a track above the storage floor that he’d clocked when they first came in and filed away as potentially interesting and was now reconsidering in a completely different context.

The crane.

It was a heavy industrial unit, ceiling mounted, designed for moving palletised loads across the warehouse floor, and it was still connected to the backup generator that was keeping the cold storage running which meant it was still powered which meant it still worked.

He looked at the crane track running above the horde below. Looked at the shelving units stacked with palletised goods, heavy, the kind of weight that became a very different kind of problem when it was falling from height onto something that didn’t know it was coming.

He looked at the crane control panel mounted on the mezzanine wall six feet to his left.

"Does anyone know how to operate a warehouse crane," he said.

Silence.

Then one of the leader’s women, the one who had been sitting against the supervisor office wall with her knees up, raised her hand slightly without looking up.

Everyone looked at her.

She looked at the crane control panel and then at Michael and she had the particular expression of someone who had been invisible for long enough that being looked at directly required a moment of adjustment.

"Warehouse logistics," she said quietly. "Before."

Michael looked at the crane. Looked at her. Looked at the Brute moving through the horde below with its bone plated shoulders clearing a path through everything around it.

"What’s your name," he said.

She looked at him. "Anya."

"Anya," he said. "How good are you with that crane."

She looked at the control panel for a second and then looked at the Brute below and something in her expression shifted from invisible to present in a way that happened quickly and completely.

"Good enough," she said and stood up.

[Ding! New Survivor — Anya. +1 Bond Point.]

The leader looked at Anya standing up. Looked at Michael. His jaw worked once.

Michael looked back at him steadily and then turned to Anya.

"Show me," he said.

---