The crane control panel was a standard industrial unit, it was like a joystick and a set of load controls and a position display that showed the crane head currently parked above the north end of the warehouse floor directly over the densest section of the horde.

Anya stood in front of it with the focused stillness of someone whose hands remembered something their brain hadn’t accessed in thirty days and she looked at the controls for three seconds and then her hands found the positions they knew.

"The shelving units on the east side," Michael said, looking at the floor below. "Third row in. Those are the heaviest loaded ones. If the crane can get a chain on the top section and pull—"

"It’ll come down across the floor," Anya said already moving the joystick. "I need someone to go out on the crane arm and attach the chain to the shelving unit."

Silence on the mezzanine.

"The arm is twelve feet above the floor," Sera said.

"Yes," Anya said.

Michael looked at the crane arm extending above the horde then at the chain on the mezzanine decking that the chain man had put down when they pulled the staircase.

He then turned at the gap between the mezzanine railing and the crane arm that was about four feet of empty air above a warehouse floor full of Rotters. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

"I’ll go," he said.

"Michael!," Maya said immediately.

"I need you watching the pulse relay," he said, which was true, and it was also the version of the answer that didn’t require him to explain that he wasn’t sending anyone else out on a crane arm over several hundred Rotters. "Tell me if anything changes below. Anything at all."

She looked at him with both of those things in her eyes at once, the understanding that he was right and the part that didn’t care that he was right, and she nodded.

He picked up the chain and looked at the four foot gap between the railing and the crane arm and didn’t think about what was below it and jumped.

He caught the crane arm with both hands and the impact jarred through his left shoulder and he felt the compromised muscle scream at him but his grip held and he pulled himself up onto the arm and lay flat on it for a second breathing and not looking down.

Then he looked down.

The horde was directly below him, twelve feet down, a sea of movement that had no gaps in it and no awareness of the man lying on the crane arm above it yet.

The Brute was visible from up here, its bone plated shoulders broad and pale under the warehouse lighting, moving in a slow circuit of the floor with the patient authority of something that owned whatever space it was in.

Michael moved along the arm.

Hand over hand, flat on the metal, the chain looped over his shoulder, he worked his way along the crane arm toward the east shelving units and the horde below him shifted and groaned and one of them looked up and he went completely still and the thing looked at the crane arm with the unfocused eyes of something whose threat recognition was running on very basic processing and then looked away again.

He kept moving.

He got the chain around the top section of the third row shelving unit and secured it and looked back at the mezzanine and gave Anya a nod.

She pulled the crane.

The shelving unit held for two seconds, metal bolts in a concrete floor fighting the crane motor, and then it came away from the floor all at once and swung and the load on it, four hundred kilos of palletised pharmaceutical stock, came with it and the whole mass swept across the warehouse floor in an arc that went through the densest section of the horde like a hand clearing a table.

The sound was enormous.

Rotters went down in a mass, the sheer physical displacement of that much weight moving that fast through that density, and the Brute took the edge of the shelving unit across its left side and staggered, the first time Michael had seen something that size stagger, and the horde around it rippled outward from the impact like a stone dropped in water.

Michael got back to the mezzanine faster than he had gotten out.

He landed on the decking and his left shoulder told him it was done enduring the torture and he grabbed the railing with his right hand and looked down at the floor.

The Brute was back on its feet.

It was looking up.

Directly at the mezzanine.

"That got its attention," the chain man said helpfully from somewhere behind him.

"Maya," Michael said.

"It’s moving toward the wall below us," she said, already on the pulse. "Slowly. Michael it’s very large up close."

"I know."

"What’s the plan for the part where it gets here."

Michael looked at the crane. At the remaining shelving units. At the cold storage bays at the far end of the floor that the sweep had cleared a path to. At the loading bay entrance that the horde was still pouring through on the far side.

At the backup generator door on the wall beside the cold storage that was keeping the crane powered.

He looked at Anya. "If the generator goes off does the crane lock in position."

She thought for a second. "Emergency brake engages on power loss. Yes."

"Can you get the crane arm directly above the Brute."

She looked at the position display. Looked down at the Brute moving below. Her hands moved on the joystick and the crane tracked across the ceiling and settled into position above the thing below and the shadow of the crane arm fell across the Brute’s bone plated shoulders.

Michael looked at the chain still hanging from the crane hook.

Heavy industrial chain. Crane rated for two thousand kilos. The chain alone weighed enough that dropping it from ceiling height onto something standing below it was not nothing.

"Drop the chain on it," he said. "Full release."

Anya hit the release.

The chain dropped.

Twelve feet of heavy industrial chain falling from ceiling height onto the Brute’s skull produced a sound that cut through everything else in the warehouse for one clear second and the Brute went to one knee under the impact, the first time it had gone to anything, and the horde around it shifted and scattered from the sound and in the pulse Michael felt the Brute’s signature flicker.

Not gone. But flickering.

"Again," he said. "Get it back on the hook and drop it again."

"That takes two minutes," Anya said, hands already moving.

"Then we have two minutes." He looked at the leader. "Your gun."

The leader looked at him.

"You have ammunition for a reason," Michael said. "That thing goes down we have a window. The horde follows the Brute. Brute goes down, the horde loses its anchor and starts to scatter. That’s our exit."

The leader looked at the Brute below, still on one knee, the chain around its shoulders, pulling itself back up with the slow terrible patience of something that didn’t understand staying down. He looked at his handgun. Looked at Michael.

He handed it over without a word.

Michael looked at the gun. He had fired a weapon exactly once in his life, a range day a colleague had organised three years ago that he’d gone to because he had nothing else to do that Saturday, and he had been unremarkable at it.

He looked at the Brute below pulling itself upright.

He looked at the gun again.

Then he looked at Sera.

She met his eyes and held out her hand and he gave her the gun without needing to say anything else about it because Sera had been a lot of things before the world ended and apparently one of them was someone who knew how to use a firearm because she checked the chamber and the magazine with the practiced movement of someone for whom this was not the first time and looked down at the Brute and waited.

The crane hook came back into position above the Brute.

"Ready," Anya said.

Sera looked at Michael.

He nodded.

Anya dropped the chain and Sera fired twice in the same second and the Brute took the chain across the skull again and the two shots hit the junction of neck and shoulder where the bone plating had a gap and the combination of the two things together was apparently what the threshold was because the Brute went down and this time the pulse signature didn’t flicker.

It went out.

The warehouse went very quiet for about three seconds.

Then the horde, without its anchor, began to do exactly what Michael had said it would do.

The directed mass pressure of it dissolved, the signatures on the pulse losing their cohesion and beginning to drift in different directions, some toward the loading bay entrance, some deeper into the warehouse, some just circling with the directionless shuffle of things that had lost the thread of why they were moving.

"Now," Michael said. "Cold storage, grab what’s on the list, back to the loading bay and out. Fast."

He looked at the leader’s group. Anya was still standing at the crane controls then at the other woman still against the supervisor office wall who had watched everything with eyes that had been getting wider for the last ten minutes.

"You should come with us," Maya said. To both of them.

The leader started to say something.

Michael looked at him and the leader looked back and whatever he saw in Michael’s face in that moment made him close his mouth and look at the warehouse floor below instead.