“The sewers.” The woman stares at me, shivering in her dirt-mottled silk shawl. She clutches her sleeping newborn just a bit closer, just a bit tighter.

I nod. “Yes, that’s what I said.”

“The sewers,” she repeats, a guttural lurch to her voice. “We’re going into the sewers.”

The air conditioning sputters and dies; an odd silence falls over the clammy, windowless room. Everything is suddenly too quiet. Too loud. I hear the click of the woman’s throat as she swallows dry.

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“I’m not going into the sewers,” she hisses, the sibilants forced from her teeth like steam from a kettle. “What about my house? What about my job? And my baby—what the hell do you think I’m supposed to do with my baby?”

I close my eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale again. “Bring him with you,” I grit out. Tangles of weeks-unbrushed hair trap the irritating summer heat around my neck, and a sharp headache throbs behind my eyes, through my temple. I dig a thumb into the soft hollow below my left brow. “It’s too dangerous for the both of you. Come on, you have to leave. They can find you here. Anytime.”

The baby starts to wail, siren-like. The sound ricochets off the cement walls, and the solitary light bulb above us flickers and swings with a sanguine laziness. I curse under my breath.

“Shhh… shush, please, shush, it’s okay, shhh—they’ll hear you—” But babies don’t understand, babies don’t care, and life is ugly, I think. The woman pats him with panicky hands, the same irregular cadence as my thudding heartbeat. And then—

I feel them before I hear them. Footsteps. My blood chills to ice. No, no. I open my mouth to scream run, we have to run, I have to run—but my lungs fail and my jaw slackens and my tongue numbs and I find myself choking on damp, damp air. The telltale stench of rot, the cloying bitterness, the shuddering dread that accompanies something unalive yet not dead—

At that moment, adrenaline finally decides to pump in, and I shove the woman with her bawling baby toward the open trapdoor on the other side of the room. “Get in, get in,” I scream—they’ve heard us anyway—“get in, lock it behind you, go down the ladder to the fifth floor—don’t come back! You hear me? Don’t come back!”

“Are you not—”

But then the trapdoor clunks shut and they’re gone and it’s just me in the room, me and my traitor heart, traitor brain, because why did I send them down there?

The door to the room swings open. A man steps onto the threshold, looks at me piteously. Waits.

“I got them,” I rasp after a long beat.

His face cracks into a long sneer. “Good work. Y’think they’re enough to keep the necrovians back a week or two more?”

“Y-yeah,” I breathe, because they are. Because they have to be.

The man walks closer. The smell of rot grows stronger. A shrill scream rings from far below, and it sounds terribly like mine.