But something caught him.
A hand closed around his calf. Gray, bloated, the skin split along the knuckles to expose the dark tissue beneath. A second hand followed, blackened nails raking at the fabric.
“Finn—!”
He snarled and drove his boot down. The thing didn’t register it. Its jaw hung unhinged, snapping at the air slightly below his leg with a hollow click of bone on bone, and what was wrong wasn’t the sound but the rhythm of it—patient, like it could do this forever. The stench from its open mouth was a physical thing in the air, a flavor I couldn’t spit out.
It looked up at me. Whatever was behind its eyes was still in there.
“Climb!” he roared.
I climbed. The metal shook and groaned beneath us, and beneath that sound came the other one—fingers finding the rungs below our feet, the scrape of them methodical and unhurried, as though they already decided how this ended. Their faces tilted upward. Torn lips pulled back from dark gums,teeth cracked and stained, and none of that was the worst part. The worst part was the expressions. Each face wore something that was almost concentration—brows furrowed, eyes tracking, heads adjusting incrementally as we moved. Like they were solving something.
I cleared the platform’s edge, and my legs went.
Finn was still on the ladder.
The thing had climbed to his thigh, grip tightening, fabric splitting. I got my bag off my shoulder and swung it into the side of its skull.
Once.
Twice.
Bone caved inward with a wet give that traveled up through the bag and into my hand. Dark fluid seeped from the depression—not blood, something thicker and fouler. A strip of scalp hung from the backpack’s canvas on the back swing.
The thing shrieked—a high, tearing sound with no clean upper limit, metal and biology failing at the same frequency.
Its hands stayed locked on the ladder as the rest of it hung in limp disarray.
“Let go!” I swung again with everything left in my body behind it.
Finn used the momentum, wrenching his leg sideways at the same instant. The grip slipped just enough. He drove his boot directly into its face, and the jaw dislocated on impact, the lower half swinging loose on a single remaining strip of tendon, and something dark and viscous began tracking from its ear as one eye bulged outward from the force.
It dropped from the ladder.
For one second, I thought it would simply fall.
It landed on its feet.
Its head tilted upward past the angle where a neck is designed to stop. The dislocated jaw swung with the movement.
Then the mass reached it. They moved over each other without acknowledgment of individual bodies, hands finding faces for grip, bones snapping under weight that didn’t register as damage, climbing toward us as one thing with one appetite.
“Finn!” I grabbed his arm with both hands and pulled with everything remaining in me.
He surged upward, caught the platform edge, the muscles in his forearms standing hard against the skin as he dragged himself over. The moment he cleared the edge, we both turned on the ladder, hands slipping and fumbling, and wrenched it upward.
The metal screeched as it rose. One of them had already reached the lowest rung and held on as its body swung free, dangling, until the weight of the others tore it loose. Four snaps. It dropped into the mass below, and the mass absorbed it and kept moving.
We collapsed against the wall of the platform with our backs to the brick and gasping for air that tasted of copper and decay. The pulse in my temples beat so hard it narrowed my vision to a dark-edged tunnel.
Finn’s chest heaved beside me. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us had anything yet.
Below, they didn’t stop.
They circled the base of the building and drove themselves into the wall. Fingernails first, then the raw stumps where they had been, leaving dark smears against the brick. The sound continued after the flesh was gone. Bone on stone. Patient. Unhurried.
I pressed my back harder against the wall and worked on breathing.
