Bryan Hodukavich | Special Delivery

The road had been empty for forty minutes, which Bryan had decided to count as a good thing.

It was a decision he kept having to make again. Every few miles the dark would press a little closer against the windshield, the pines crowding the shoulder in black, snow-laden ranks, and he would remind himself that empty roads were what he was being paid for. Empty roads meant no traffic, no delays, no one to ask what was in the case. Easy money. That was what he'd told Michelle, standing in the kitchen with his keys already in his hand and the argument sitting between them like a third person at the table.

Easy money, babe. One run. We'll need it.

He had said we. He'd noticed himself saying it, and so had she.

The heater ticked and breathed against his shins, and the cab smelled of old upholstery and gas station coffee gone cold in the cup holder. His phone lay face up on the dash, glowing at its lowest brightness. Four missed calls, all from the same name, the last one nineteen minutes ago. There was no signal now anyway. The little bars had dwindled one by one as the road climbed, and for the past ten miles it had been a single grey bar and then nothing at all. He glanced at it more often than he needed to. He did it again now, and it was still nothing.

"Great," he muttered. "Perfect. Love that for me."

In the passenger seat, the green medical transport bag sat belted in like a reluctant child. A white cross marked its front, with HUMAN ORGAN FOR TRANSPLANT printed beneath it in block letters. The insulated sides were scuffed from use, a black zipper running around the lid, and a tamper seal secured the opening. He had been told, twice, not to break it. Delivery to Raccoon City General, receiving dock, no later than five. No name on the paperwork, just a code and a signature line. The man who had handed it over had not met his eyes. He had been sweating in the loading bay, in January, in a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he had taken a long moment over the clipboard before he let Bryan sign. Bryan had put that down to nerves. Medical people were always weirdly intense about their little boxes.

He looked at it. He looked at the road. He turned the radio up.

It was something with a lot of guitar, a college station out of Boulder that came and went with the terrain, and he let it wash over him for two songs. Then the second song stuttered. Not a dropped signal, exactly. It was the music going thin and wet, like a voice speaking through a mouthful of something, and under it a low pulsing tone began to rise. Three notes, steady, flat, and mechanical. A pause. Three again.

"Okay, no," Bryan said. "We're not doing that."

He thumbed the dial. A preacher, fading. Static. A woman's voice, perfectly calm, reading out what sounded like a list of road names, and then the three notes again, and her voice stopped halfway through a word. He turned it off. The silence in the cab was immediate and enormous, the engine's drone suddenly loud in it, the tires hissing on slush.

He drove for another mile with both hands on the wheel, which he did not usually do.

The first thing he saw was the deer.

It stood on the shoulder at the edge of the headlights, a doe, broadside to the road, perfectly still. Bryan eased off the gas on instinct, braced for the leap. It did not leap. As he drew level, its head hung low, nearly to the snow, and its jaw was working side to side in a slow, patient, grinding rhythm, chewing on nothing at all. Steam rolled off its flank in thick ribbons. There was something wrong with the shape of that flank, a bulge under the hide that seemed to settle as he watched, like something turning over in its sleep.

He didn't brake. He didn't speed up either. He just drove past, eyes locked on the side mirror until the red wash of his taillights lost it, and then he let his breath out slowly through his teeth.

"Nope," he said to no one. "Nope, nope. Not my business. Deer weirdness. Rabies. Totally normal."

A quarter mile on, there was a police cruiser angled across the far lane with both front doors hanging open. Its light bar was still turning, silent, painting the snow in slow bands of red and blue, over and over, as though it had been left that way for someone to find. No officers. A radio handset swung on its coiled cord against the door frame. On the road beside the open driver's side, the snow had been churned into a wide dark trough, as if something heavy had been dragged, and then not dragged, but pulled, and the trough ended at the treeline.

He did not slow for that either. He couldn't have said why his foot pressed down harder. His hands had gone slick inside his gloves and he flexed them against the wheel, one at a time, and noticed the tremor in them with an odd, detached annoyance, like finding a stain on a shirt before an interview.

Five o'clock, he thought. Receiving dock. Just get there.

The road bent. A long uphill stretch rose out of the trees into an open saddle of the mountain, bare and white and lit only by the weak cone of his headlights, and the wind had begun to tug at the truck in long, low pulls. Snow streamed sideways across the beams. He squinted into it, wipers thumping, and that was when he saw the figure.

It stood at the edge of the road, perhaps two hundred yards ahead, just inside the reach of the light. Upright, dark against the white, one arm lifted at an angle he took a moment to understand. Not waving. Reaching out toward the lane, hand open, held there.

His foot came off the gas without his permission.

Everything sensible in him spoke at once. Two hours from anywhere. A cruiser with its doors flung open. A doe chewing air. A radio that had started to count. Do not stop. Do not stop. You are a courier. You are a man with a package and a pregnant girlfriend and a very simple job.

He scanned the verge as he coasted closer, hunting for the explanation that would let him off the hook. A stalled car. A hazard triangle. A second person, a dog, a flashlight, anything. There was only the empty road behind the figure, the pines beyond it, and the snow filling in the space where a vehicle should have been. Whoever this was had arrived here on foot, in this, and had decided that standing in the dark with their arm out was the better option.

The shape sharpened as the truck rolled forward in a long, reluctant coast, tires crunching, the heater panting at his legs. A person, definitely a person. Shoulders hunched against the wind. Snow caked along one side of them as if they'd been there since before it started. He kept waiting for them to move, to step toward the headlights, to wave, to do something a normal stranded person would do. They didn't. They simply watched the truck come, and he had the uncomfortable sense of being measured.

Don't be that guy, said a smaller voice, the one that had never once helped him in his life and had somehow gotten him through most of it. You'd want someone to stop.

"God," Bryan said, "I hate you."

He put on the hazards. The truck shuddered to a halt a few yards short of them, the amber light pulsing across the snow and over the stranger's shape, swelling and fading, swelling and fading. Beside him, the medical bag shifted slightly against its seatbelt as the truck settled. He didn't look at it. He kept his foot on the brake, one hand drifting to the gearshift, the other already easing the window down three inches. The cold came in like a slap, smelling of pine and iron and something else underneath, faintly sweet.

He had a clear view of them now. He also had a very clear view of how far from anywhere this was, and of the fact that he had not checked his mirrors in the last minute. He checked them now. Nothing behind. Nothing moving in the trees. Just the dark, and the wind, and the two of them.

"Hey," he called, and his voice came out higher than he wanted. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Hey. You okay? It's, uh. It's really not a night to be out here." A short, brittle laugh escaped him, and he hated it. "Like, at all. Where the hell did you even come from?"

The hazards ticked. The wind pushed at the truck. He watched them in the glass and the mirror both, one hand still on the gear lever and his heart going a little too fast for a man who had only slowed down to be nice.

"I mean it, though," he said, quieter. "Are you hurt? Do you need a ride?"

The city had gone quiet in the wrong way, the way a house goes quiet when everyone in it is holding their breath.

Bryan had left the truck four blocks back, nose down in a drift against a bus shelter, after the road ahead had been choked with stalled cars, doors open, headlights still burning in a long and useless line. The National Guard barricade at the end of the street had been abandoned too, sandbags and orange barrels and a single boot lying on its side in the slush. He had not stopped to wonder about the boot. He had a rule now. Do not wonder about the boot.

The bag hung from his shoulder on its strap, knocking against his hip with every step. It was heavier than it had any right to be.

"Receiving dock," he muttered. "Five o'clock. Easy money."

The words came out as vapour and tore apart in the wind.

Raccoon City sprawled around him in the dark, and it looked like itself, which was the worst part. A pharmacy with its security grate half down. A string of Christmas lights still blinking along the awning of a diner, red, green, red, green, lighting an empty counter and a row of stools. A bank clock, frozen at 2:17. Somewhere far off to the east a siren rose and fell and rose again, and the sound never came any closer. A smell sat under the snow and woodsmoke, flat and sweetish, like meat left out on a counter. His eyes kept watering, and he had stopped pretending it was only the cold.

He kept to the walls. He had no plan beyond that. Every few steps he stopped, tilted his head, and listened, then felt stupid, then did it again, because the one time he had not, something had come out of a laundromat doorway with its jaw hanging open at an angle jaws did not go. He had run. He was still a little amazed at how fast he could run.

His phone had died an hour ago. His thumb went to his pocket anyway, a reflex like touching a bruise. Mich. Mich, I'm okay. I'm gonna be late, but I'm okay. It was a lie he'd been rehearsing in his head all night, and he was getting better at it.

He was passing the mouth of an alley beside a shuttered tire shop when he heard it.

It was thin and high and ragged at the edges. Not a scream, exactly. A cry, broken off and starting up again, the kind of sound a person makes when they have been making it for a long time and no longer believe anyone will come. It rose, wavered, and dropped into a wet, gulping sob. Then, very clearly, a word.

"...please."

Bryan stopped walking.

Every muscle in his body arrived at the same conclusion at the same instant, and it was no. He knew exactly how this went. He had seen the movies, he had watched the dumb guy hear the noise and go toward the noise, and he had thrown popcorn at the screen. He was not that guy. He was a medical courier with a delivery, a girlfriend, and a baby coming in the spring that he had not yet worked up the nerve to be scared of properly. He had one job and it was to not die.

"Nope," he whispered. "Nope. Not my business. Absolutely not."

The cry came again, closer to a whimper now, and his stomach turned over.

"Oh, come on," he said, to the sky, to whoever ran this. "Come on."

He did not move for a long, miserable moment. He looked down the street, empty and white under the failing streetlights, the way he had been heading. He looked at the alley. The dark inside it was the thick, unmoving kind that swallowed light rather than lacking it.

Trained professionals should handle this, he thought. That's what they're for. That is literally their entire thing.

There were no trained professionals. There was a boot in the snow, and a cruiser in the road, and a diner full of empty stools.

"God, I don't get paid enough for this shit," Bryan said, and went looking for a weapon.

It took him a few seconds. A construction site fence ran along the side of the tire shop, and a rusted length of rebar lay in the slush at its foot, thick as his wrist and nearly as long as his arm, one end bent into a hook. He crouched, picked it up, and nearly dropped it. The metal was so cold it burned straight through his glove. He took it in both hands and hefted it, and the weight felt wrong, dead and unbalanced, like holding a thing he had never learned to hold.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So I just. Swing it. At things. That's the plan."

He slid the bag higher on his back, tightened the strap, and went in.

The alley swallowed him by stages. First the streetlight went, then the glow of the diner, until there was only the faint grey seep of the sky between the rooftops and the snow beneath his boots, which glowed. Brick on his left, slick and dripping. A row of dumpsters on his right, lids gaping, and beyond them a rusted fire escape that groaned in the wind. He kept the rebar up in front of him like a man holding a candle in a cellar. His breath rasped in his ears. Something dripped, steadily, somewhere ahead.

He kept expecting the cry again, and it did not come. That was worse. A silence that arrived exactly when he had committed himself had the feel of a door swinging shut.

"Hello?" he whispered. It came out cracked. He tried again. "Hello? I heard you. I'm, uh. I'm not gonna hurt you. I just want to know if you're okay."

Wind. The drip. Under it, so faint he might have invented it, a slow wet sound, like a mouth working around something soft.

The smell was stronger here. Sweet and sour, hot copper, rot. His eyes watered. He kept walking because he knew that if he stopped, he'd turn around, and then he'd spend the rest of his life wondering whether he'd left someone to die. The alley doglegged ahead, a hard right turn between the tire shop's back wall and a brick corner slick with something that was not water. He could see it now, a sheen of dark running down the mortar in thin, glistening lines, and he made a decision not to wonder about that either.

Behind the corner, someone drew a long, shuddering breath. A voice, tiny, wrecked, spoke up from the dark.

"Please. Don't look."

Bryan's whole body locked. His grip tightened on the rebar until his knuckles ached. The voice had been a woman's and it had been near, nearer than it had any right to be, and underneath it, overlapping, another sound had begun. A long, wet, patient dragging, like a sack being pulled across stone.

Go back, said every nerve he owned. Go back, go back, go back.

But she had asked him not to look. And in his experience, that was the most reliable way in the world to make someone look.

He took the last step, leaned out past the corner, and swore so loudly and so viciously it echoed off the bricks.

"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me."

The thing behind him had stopped pretending this was a chase and started treating it like a walk it was enjoying.

Bryan could hear that in the sound it made. At first there had been the frantic slap of feet on packed snow, a body throwing itself after him, and he had understood that sound. He could run from that sound. Now there was something else under it, a wet, rhythmic slithering, like a hose being dragged across a gravel drive, and it kept pace with him easily, and every so often something in it clicked.

He did not look back. He had looked back once, at the corner of Alder Street, and had seen enough to make his legs work harder than he had known they could. A man's torso, he thought. Or it had been. The shoulders still wore the tatters of a work shirt, but from the ribs down the shape had come apart into a thick, glistening bundle of cords that pulled and braced and flung the rest of it forward, and the face had hung at an angle on the neck, mouth wide, wide, wider, the corners tearing as it opened. It had been saying something. That was the part he could not put down. It had been saying a name, over and over, with the patient intensity of someone trying to be heard.

Not mine, he thought. Not my name. Please let it not be mine.

The case slammed against his hip with every stride. Green insulated fabric, the sides scuffed pale from years of loading docks. The strap had cut a line across his shoulder and his collarbone sang with it. He hauled it tighter against his side, one hand clamped over the black zipper and the tamper seal, as if the seal were the one thing in the world still intact.

"Okay," he panted. "Okay, okay, okay. Not dying. Not tonight. Not on a street."

The street was a long, white tunnel of dark houses. Porch lights dead. Cars buried to the wheel arches. A plastic snowman lay face down on a lawn with its carrot nose snapped off, and a child's sled had been left halfway up a driveway, rope trailing, as though someone had been called indoors in the middle of the afternoon and had never come out again. His boots skidded on a patch of ice beneath the snow and he went down on one knee, hard, and the cold went through his jeans like a blade. He was up again before he had decided to be.

Behind him the clicking quickened.

It had gotten closer. He knew it the way you know a hot stove is near, with the skin of his back. A smell rolled over him on the wind, copper and bile and something sweetish and rotted, and a long wet slap hit the snow just behind his heel. Something brushed the back of his jacket. Light, almost curious. A single cold fingertip drawn along the fabric.

Bryan made a sound he would later refuse to remember.

He cut left across a lawn without thinking, vaulted a low hedge and caught his foot on the top of it, stumbled, and slammed into the side of a parked sedan hard enough to see white. The alarm did not go off. Nothing in this town did. He pushed off the hood and kept moving, and there, at the end of a short flagstone path, was a house.

Two storeys, narrow, vinyl siding the colour of old teeth. A wreath hung on the front door, fake pine and red ribbon, and a mat on the step read WELCOME HOME in cheerful block letters. He had never wanted to be welcomed anywhere so badly in his life.

He took the porch steps in two bounds and hit the door with his shoulder, already reaching for the handle.

It did not give.

He rattled it. He twisted it the other way and rattled it again, and the door shook in its frame and held, a solid, dead, stupid piece of wood. "No," he said. "No, no, no, come on. It's a house. People leave houses open. It's a whole thing." He slammed the heel of his hand against it. He tried the handle a third time, as if it might have reconsidered.

Behind him the slithering stopped.

That was somehow worse. He turned his head, very slowly, and looked back down the path.

It had come to the edge of the lawn and halted there, a dark and ragged shape against the grey snow, perhaps thirty feet away. The cords of its lower half lay coiled and trembling, several of them anchored in the turf, flexing like the legs of a spider settling its weight. The torso was lifted. The head tilted. In the dim, wrong light, the mouth worked slowly open and shut, open and shut, and a long, thick tongue, or something that was trying to be a tongue, lolled and curled past the teeth.

"...He....lp..." it said.

His whole body went cold and loose.

Help. That was what it had said. Not a threat, not a warning, not some animal noise dragged through a ruined throat. A word. A perfectly ordinary word, spoken by something that had been trying to tear him apart for the last three blocks. Worse, the face above that impossible mass of cords still looked human in places. He could see it now, beneath the torn skin and the terrible angle of the jaw. There was a person in there. Or there had been.

Oh, God. Oh, God, you know what you're doing, don't you?

One of the cords lifted from the snow and swayed in the air, as though tasting it, and then slid forward across the lawn with a long, patient, hissing whisper.

Bryan spun back to the door and threw his shoulder against it a second time. Pain flared from collarbone to elbow and the door shuddered but did not break. He slapped at the frame, at the lock, at the neat little brass numerals beside the bell, and his hand struck the glass of the narrow window set into the wall beside the door, and rattled it.

He froze.

A pale curtain hung behind the glass, thin and lacy, drawn nearly closed. It was the sort of curtain that someone's grandmother had chosen. There was a gap in it, no wider than a hand. Beyond the gap lay a dark hallway and the blurred suggestion of a staircase, and nothing else, and he told himself to stop looking.

Then the curtain moved.

Not in a draught. No draught could have done it. The lace drew back an inch, then another, held aside from within by something he could not see, and a shape stood behind it in the dark of the hall. It simply stood there, utterly still, watching him.

Behind him, the cord slid onto the bottom step of the porch.

Bryan's breath stuttered. He pressed his palm flat against the cold glass, the case crushed against his hip, and whispered, in a voice he barely recognised as his own, "Hey. Hey, please. Please, I can see you in there."

The gas station had the particular brightness of a place that never expected to be looked at.

Bryan saw it from a mile off, a white box of light set down in the black fold of the mountain, and the sight of it did something to his chest that he did not examine. Two pumps. A canopy buzzing in the cold. A single car at the far end of the lot, dark and snow dusted, the way a car looks when someone has parked it and walked away from it for good. He pulled in beside the nearer pump and sat with the engine running, hands at ten and two, until the heater had finished its long ticking sigh.

"Five minutes," he told the windshield. "Gas, bathroom, something that isn't gas station coffee. Then we go."

He did not say who we was. The case sat belted in the passenger seat, and he looked at it, and it did not look back, which was how he preferred it. Green insulated fabric, the sides scuffed pale from years of loading docks and van floors, the white cross on the front with HUMAN ORGAN FOR TRANSPLANT printed beneath it in block capitals that had always struck him as needlessly blunt. The black zipper ran around the lid, the tamper seal bridging it, cold and intact. He had been told, in a loading bay by a man who would not meet his eyes, never to leave it unattended. Not in the truck. Not for a minute.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered, and slung the strap over his shoulder.

The cold hit him at the door of the cab like a handful of nails. He pumped with his back to the wind, watching the numbers roll, and listened to the quiet. No traffic. No crickets, obviously, in January, but the quiet had a thick quality to it, as if something nearby had stopped making noise a moment before he arrived. Beyond the canopy's reach the pines stood in their ranks. Far off, down the mountain, a thin orange glow sat on the horizon where Raccoon City should have been, and he told himself it was sodium lights.

The pump clicked off. He hung up the nozzle, wiped his hand on his jeans, and went inside.

A bell on the door gave one dry, tinny note. The warmth was immediate, and with it a smell of burnt coffee, floor cleaner, and fried food that had been under a heat lamp since the previous afternoon. Rows of chips and candy in cheerful, aggressive colours. A rack of cheap sunglasses, in January. Beyond the shelves, a long counter with a lottery machine and a rotating case of hot dogs gone the colour of old leather.

Nobody behind it.

"Hello?" Bryan called. His voice sounded small. "Hey, uh, I'm just grabbing a few things."

A radio murmured somewhere in the back, a news voice speaking in the careful, flat cadence of someone reading a statement. He caught the words remain indoors and authorities and then the signal slid out from under it in a smear of static. A mop bucket stood beside the counter with a yellow wet floor sign propped against it, and the water in the bucket was a faint, rusty pink.

Not my business, he thought. Cleaning. Somebody cleaned something. It's a gas station.

He took a basket from the stack and then, remembering the case, abandoned it. His arms would be full anyway. He moved down the first aisle at the pace of a man pretending he had not noticed anything, and began to collect. A bag of salt and vinegar chips. A second bag, because the first would not survive the next ten miles. A bottle of water. Jerky, the kind in the resealable bag. A foil packet of cheese crackers, a candy bar, a gas station sandwich in a wedge of plastic that he held up to the light, regretted, and took anyway. A can of something with a lightning bolt on the label and a warning about pregnancy that made him stop for half a second and put the can back.

He picked it up again. Then he put it back again. Then he stood there like an idiot, holding nothing, thinking of Michelle at the kitchen table with her hand pressed flat against her stomach, not looking at him.

"Don't," he said quietly. "Not right now."

He grabbed a different can, a coffee in a can, and took two chargers off the rack because his phone had been dying on him for an hour. Items began to pile up against his chest. A chip bag slid down his forearm and he caught it with his chin. The sandwich threatened to slip. He shifted the case strap higher on his shoulder, hugged the whole armful tighter with one elbow, and fished in his jacket for his keys, since he had apparently decided to carry those too.

The refrigerated cabinet along the back wall was humming. He turned toward it, craning to find the milk, thinking only about milk, and the shelf end at the corner of the aisle rose up out of nowhere in a flash of colour, and so did someone coming around it from the other side.

They collided with the soft, stupid, total impact of two people who had each assumed the other was not there.

"Oh, shit," Bryan said.

It all went at once. The chips leapt from his arms. The water bottle hit the linoleum and rolled. Jerky, crackers, both chargers, the sandwich in its plastic wedge, the can of coffee that bounced twice and spun in a drunken circle. The keys went last, a bright metallic chime that skittered across the floor and came to rest against a stranger's boot. The case swung on its strap and slammed into his hip, and he caught the strap in a reflex that was half panic, hand clamping on the zipper and the tamper seal, checking it was whole before he even checked himself.

It was. He let out a breath.

Then he looked up.

She was standing very close, close enough that he could see the snow still melting in her hair and the faint, rising colour in her cheeks from the cold, or from the shock, or from something else. For a moment neither of them said a word. The radio hissed. Somewhere in the back of the store, behind the fluorescent hum, something shifted with a slow, damp sound, like weight settling in a wet bag.

Bryan's eyes flicked toward it, then back to her, searching her face for some sign that she'd heard it too.

"Sorry," he said, the word coming out a little too fast, a little too high. A laugh escaped him, brittle and unconvincing. "Sorry, I'm, uh. I'm so sorry. I didn't see you. I was, you know. Juggling."

He gestured at the scattered wreckage across the floor, at his own empty arms, and then, because the silence had begun to stretch, at the door behind her, the dark lot beyond it, the lone car sitting under its dusting of snow.

"That your car out there?" he asked, and heard how it sounded, and winced. "I mean. Are you okay? You look like you've been out in it a while."

The wall was a terrible idea, and Bryan knew it was a terrible idea, and he went at it anyway because the alternative was behind him and had been laughing for the last two blocks.

It was not laughing, exactly. It was making the sound a laugh makes when it has been taken apart and put back together by something that had only heard one described. A wet, hitching, multiple sound, several throats working out of time. He had caught it in pieces over his shoulder. A woman's shoulders in a nurse's tunic. A man's forearm, stitched into the crook of her neck. A third thing, small, dragged along underneath, with its face turned up and its eyes still open, blinking at the sky. They had been people, once, and now they were one thing, pulling itself down Fenwick Street on a thicket of pink cords that struck the snow and heaved, struck and heaved, closing the distance with the dreadful ease of something that did not tire.

The bag hammered his hip. He had the strap wrapped twice around his fist, the black zipper and its tamper seal pressed into his palm. If he lost it, he lost the only reason anyone would ever come looking for him.

"Dead end," he gasped. "It's a dead end, of course it's a dead end, who builds a street like this?"

Chain link ahead, higher than his head. A brick wall to the left, windowless. To the right, the narrow side of a two storey house, its fence knocked flat, a drainpipe running up the siding beside an outbuilding with a sloped tin roof. Above the roof, a window. Dark glass. Curtains drawn.

He did not decide. His body simply tallied the options and handed him the worst one.

He got one boot on the lid of a rusted trash bin and flung himself at the outbuilding wall. His fingers found the lip of the gutter and it bent under him with a shriek. His left foot skidded off the siding and the whole world swung, the case dragging at him like a hand, and he scrabbled, kicking, wheezing, and somehow his knee hooked the edge of the roof and he rolled onto the tin on his stomach with a clang that must have been audible in the next county.

"Okay," he whispered to the metal. "Okay. That was. That was kind of sick. Oh my God."

Below, the cords arrived.

They came around the corner of the fence all at once, a pink rope tangle that spread across the yard and flowed up the wall in ropy, questing loops. The nurse's face rose after them on its stalk of neck, tilting, nostrils flaring. It found him and its mouth opened, and the other mouths opened with it, a row of them, down the throat, along the collar, each one wet and pink and working. The sound that came out was a chorus. Every voice rasped a different pained sound.

"Nope!" he squeaked, and got to his feet.

The roof was narrow and slick with ice and slanted against him. He took a step, two, arms flung wide like a man on a wire, the case swinging out from his shoulder and pulling him off axis. A cord whipped past his ankle. He hopped it. Another snapped around the gutter behind him and the tin buckled, a long, ripping groan. The window was a body length away, and he did what any reasonable courier with no athletic history would do.

He ran, three steps, and jumped.

For one weightless, idiotic instant he thought he had it. He saw his own reflection coming at him in the dark glass, wild eyed, mouth open, hair standing up, a green case flying out behind him like a flag. Then his shin caught the sill, his centre of gravity went somewhere unrecoverable, and he hit the window with his shoulder and the entire pane exploded inward.

The world became noise and glass and curtains. The fabric wrapped his face. He pitched through the frame headfirst, landed on something soft that was not quite a mattress, bounced off it, and hit the floorboards on his back in a spray of shards with the case crashing down across his chest. The breath left him in one long wheeze.

He lay there. Cold air poured in over his face. Somewhere under the ringing in his ears, glass was still falling, small chiming pieces coming to rest.

"Ow," Bryan told the ceiling, quite calmly. "Ow. Ow. Okay."

It took him a moment to understand that he was in a room.

A bedroom. A lamp on its side on the floor, bulb dead. A quilt dragged half off the bed where he had struck it, and a nightstand with a glass of water, a hairbrush, a paperback face down and splayed. A row of framed photographs along the dresser, faces he could not make out in the dark. A woman's room. It smelled of lavender and old wood, and under that, very faintly, of fear, the sharp sour tang of someone who had been holding still for hours.

Oh no, he thought.

Because somebody had made this room look empty. The door was shut and a chair wedged under its handle. The other window had been covered with a mattress propped on its side. Somebody had thought about this. Somebody had been very careful.

And he had just come through the glass like a thrown brick.

Outside, the sound changed. The chorus went quiet all at once, the way a room goes quiet when everyone turns toward a noise. The gutter creaked. The tin roof flexed. Then, slow and deliberate, a single pink cord came curling over the broken sill and laid itself across the floorboards, tip first, tasting the air, and began to feel its way along the wood toward the glass on his jacket.

Bryan did not move. He could not. He turned his head, very slightly, because there was a sound from the far side of the room, a tiny one, the click of a wardrobe door easing open on its hinge.

"Please," Bryan whispered, hardly moving his lips, as the cord crept closer to his boot. "Please don't shoot me. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Please tell me you have a plan."

The bandage had been a scarf once, and Bryan was beginning to resent how well it had matched his jacket.

He kept his left hand tucked into his armpit as he moved along the hospital's service road, elbow clamped tight, the checked wool wound three times around the wrist and knotted with his teeth. It was soaked through. Not red, which he could have explained. The stain spreading across the pattern was a dull, brownish yellow, and it had begun to smell like a refrigerator left unplugged over a long weekend.

"It's fine," he whispered. "Totally fine. Hand stuff. People get hand stuff."

The hand did not agree. It throbbed in slow, thick pulses that he felt in his teeth, and beneath the throbbing something else was happening, a crawling tightness, as though the skin had been sewn on a size too small and was being let out from the inside. Twenty minutes ago he had been able to make a fist. Now his fingers would only curl halfway before they stuck, swollen and waxy, and when he looked at them too long he had the dizzying impression that they were slightly longer than they had been.

He stopped looking at them.

Raccoon City General rose ahead of him out of the snow, a long slab of concrete with every window dead. Row upon row of black glass, some of them smashed, one curtain blowing out of a third floor frame like a tongue. The front lot was a graveyard of abandoned vehicles. A line of olive green trucks sat nose to tail at the first barrier, doors open, engines cold, snow drifting across the driver's seats. A rifle lay in the slush beside a tyre. Nobody was holding it.

And at the very top, one strip of windows burned white.

The topmost floor was the only part of the building that had power. Steady, clinical light, perfectly ordinary, glowing above the ruin like a lamp left on in an empty house. Bryan had been staring at it for ten minutes. It was the only thing out here that looked like help, and it was a very long way up.

He ducked behind a dumpster and breathed through his mouth.

The case dragged at his right shoulder, the only shoulder he trusted now. Green insulated fabric, scuffed pale along the sides, the white cross on the front and HUMAN ORGAN FOR TRANSPLANT beneath it in block capitals. The black zipper ran around the lid, the tamper seal across it still unbroken. He had checked that four times in the last hour. It was the one thing he had managed not to ruin.

Receiving dock, he thought. Round the back. Hand it over. Somebody looks at your hand and fixes it. That's the whole plan.

It was a bad plan. He knew that because of the front entrance. He had gone there first, and had stopped thirty feet short of the revolving doors when he saw what was inside. The lobby had no lights, only the faint blue spill of a vending machine, and in that glow the floor had moved. A carpet of something dark and wet, shifting, heaving, shapes folding in and over one another with a sound like a crowd murmuring in its sleep. A gurney stood upright against the glass with a body strapped to it, and the body's mouth had been opened wide from the inside.

He had not run. His legs had simply taken him backwards until the building was out of sight.

Now, crouched behind a dumpster that stank of bleach and old coffee, Bryan tugged his sleeve down over the bandage and flexed his fingers inside it. They answered a beat late. Something in the wrist clicked, soft and wet, like a knuckle that was not supposed to bend that way.

"Stop that," he muttered, to his own arm. It was a stupid thing to say. He felt stupider still when the fingers tightened once, reflexively, around nothing, and then relaxed.

Don't think about it. Move.

He worked his way along the building's flank, keeping to the wall. Without floodlights there was nothing to hide from but the dark itself, and the dark, he was learning, had opinions. A row of ambulances stood abandoned in the loading bay, their back doors flung open on stretchers still strapped and dripping. Pooled water on the concrete had frozen in long black rivers. A fire door beside them had been chocked wide with a sandbag, and from inside came a smell of antiseptic so strong it made his eyes stream, and under it something sweeter. Somewhere deep in the corridor beyond, a slow dragging began and stopped, began and stopped.

He edged toward it. Four feet. Three.

His left hand jerked.

It happened without warning. The whole forearm snapped sideways, dragging the shoulder around with it, and his knuckles struck the wall with a crack that rang down the length of the bay. Bryan clapped his good hand over his mouth, heart slamming. The dragging in the corridor had stopped. In the silence that followed, something wet and patient began to move toward the door.

He looked down.

The scarf had come loose. One edge hung in a damp strip across the back of his hand, and the skin beneath it was not the colour it was supposed to be. Veins stood up in dark, branching lines, black at the centre and purple at the edges, running up past the wrist and under his sleeve. The wound itself, a ragged crescent of teeth marks along the heel of the hand, had opened and begun to weep a thick, clear fluid. At its centre, something pale was moving. A thread of flesh no thicker than a bootlace, curling out of the bite and feeling the air, the way a snail's horn feels its way along a branch.

"No," Bryan said. It came out almost conversational. "No, no. Come on. Not now."

He wrapped the scarf back around it with shaking fingers, pulling the knot tight until the wool bit into the skin, and the thread slid back into the wound like a worm retreating into the earth. The hand shuddered once against his grip. A fresh wave of pain rolled up his arm and left him sick and light, and he pressed his forehead against the cold brick and counted. One, two, three.

Behind him, in the dark of the fire door, something shifted its weight.

He backed away from it very slowly, the case crushed to his chest, and understood with perfect clarity that he could not do this alone. Not with this hand, not with a building full of things that fed on noise, not with twenty something floors between him and that one lit strip of glass. He needed someone. Someone who would look at the bandage and not run. Someone who knew a way up.

That was when he saw her.

She was moving along the far side of the bay, close to the wall, quick and quiet. Alone. No weapon that he could see.

Every instinct he owned said to let her pass. Anyone who looked like that, in a place like this, had her own problems and a good reason not to want his.

His left hand twitched again beneath the scarf. His eyes burned.

"Hey," Bryan hissed. "Hey! Over here. Please. Please, I'm not one of them, I swear to God, I just need a second." He swallowed. His voice cracked. "I'm a courier. I've got a delivery for the people upstairs, the ones with the lights on. I just need somebody to show me a way up that isn't through that." He nodded at the door, and the sound inside it. "And I'll owe you. Okay? I'll owe you anything."

Under the wool, soft and slow, something wet shifted against his palm.

.