He went back downstairs thirty minutes later and found Gareth’s five men in the lobby exactly where he’d left them which he took as a reasonable sign and looked at the chain man who seemed to be the one the others oriented around when Gareth wasn’t present.

"What’s your name," Michael said.

The man looked at him. "Damon."

"Damon. You five are going to clear the floors between here and six. Every Rotter still in this building. You find anything bigger than a standard Rotter you come back here and tell me before you do anything about it."

Damon looked at him. "Just clear them."

"Just clear them."

Damon stared at him.

"Long story," Michael said. "Clear the floors."

Damon looked at the other four men and then back at Michael and then picked up his chain and looked at the stairwell door.

"How are we supposed to know zombies are on the floor?" he said.

"You’ll know when you see it," Michael said and went back upstairs.

---

Gareth found him on the watchtower an hour later.

Michael heard him coming up the hatch because Gareth moved the way most people moved, with sound, and he didn’t turn around until Gareth was on the platform and standing beside him looking out at the city with the easy expression in its resting state.

The city looked the way it always looked from up here. Enormous and empty and continuing in every direction without asking anyone’s permission about it. The pulse showed him the horde signatures still scattered across the surrounding blocks, thinning but present, and the cluster eight blocks southeast that had driven the whole event today had dispersed into a wide scatter that was going to take days to fully settle.

"You knew it would thin out," Gareth said, looking at the city. "The horde."

"Hordes don’t sustain without an anchor. The Brute was the anchor."

"You knew that going in."

"I suspected it."

Gareth nodded slowly. "And the crane. That was planned."

"That was improvised."

"By you."

"By Anya," Michael said. "She knew the crane. I just asked the right question."

Gareth was quiet for a moment. He looked north toward the hospital and then east toward the warehouse and then south toward the denser parts of the city where the pulse showed him things he hadn’t mapped yet.

"You’re building something serious here," Gareth said.

"Yes."

"How serious."

Michael looked at the Tier 2 completed notification still sitting in the corner of his vision and the Tier 3 blueprint list open behind it and the barracks expansion he was planning and the perimeter wall option that unlocked at Tier 3 and the things after that.

"Serious enough," he said.

Gareth looked at him from the side. "You’re not going to tell me how."

"Not yet."

A long quiet moment between them that had several things in it that neither of them was saying.

"My men are useful," Gareth said finally. "Damon especially. He was a security contractor before. The others have been surviving this city for thirty days which means they know how to handle themselves." He paused. "I’m not stupid enough to throw that away over a disagreement about rules."

"Good," Michael said.

"But I want something in return."

Michael looked at him.

"A real place in this," Gareth said. "Not a guest. Not a charity case. A role."

Michael thought about it. He thought about the floors below that needed clearing and the perimeter that needed expanding and the supply runs that needed more bodies and the Tier 3 infrastructure that was going to require more labor than four women and himself could manage.

He thought about Anya and Rei upstairs.

He thought about the rules he’d laid out in the lobby and the way Gareth had accepted them and the arithmetic that was always running behind the easy expression.

"You want a role," Michael said. "Earn it."

Gareth looked at him.

"Your men are downstairs clearing floors," Michael said. "When they’re done bring me what they found and we’ll talk about what comes next." He looked back out at the city. "That’s how it works here. Everyone earns their place."

Gareth was quiet for a long moment.

Then he nodded once and went back down through the hatch and Michael stood on the watchtower alone and looked at the city and thought that Gareth was not done being a problem and that keeping him inside the building was probably smarter than putting him back outside it and that the next few days were going to require the particular kind of attention he gave to blueprints.

Careful. Precise. Always knowing where the weak points were before they became something else.

He pulled up the Blueprint Interface and started planning the expanded barracks.

More people meant more space and more space meant building and building was the one part of all of this he was genuinely good at.

---

By the time the floors were cleared it was dark.

Damon and the four men came back up to the sixth floor at around eight in the evening with the energy of people who had done something hard and knew they’d done it well. Three floors cleared, eleven Rotters total, one Stalker on the fourth floor that Damon had handled with the chain in a way that the man reporting it described with specific reverence.

Michael met them in the hallway and looked at the five of them and then at the stairwell door behind them.

"Stalker on four," Damon said. "Faster than the others. Took three of us."

"Anything else unusual."

"No." Damon looked at him. "You knew about the Stalker."

"I had an idea."

Damon held his gaze for a second with the expression of someone who had been adding things up since the warehouse and kept arriving at totals that didn’t fully compute. Then he looked at the hallway and the cleared floor and the reinforced doors and the perimeter panel visible at the far end pulsing its steady amber and seemed to decide that not computing was something he could live with for now.

"Where do we sleep," he said.

Michael showed them to the cleared apartments, 603 and 605, both swept and basic but dry and solid and behind locked doors which after thirty days in this city was not nothing. He left them with a supply allocation he’d pulled from storage, enough food and water for the night, no explanation of where it came from, just placed it on the counter in 603 and said it was from the building’s stores and left before anyone asked follow up questions.

He went back to his apartment and closed the reinforced door and stood in the quiet of his own space for the first time since six in the morning.