CHAPTER 4: TRAPPED BETWEEN THE DEAD

Aria slid the cloth bag off her shoulder and left it on the mat just inside the threshold, then wedged the door open with her heel and stepped into the corridor with the lamp held high in both hands.

The man in the grey shirt stood between the girl and the stairwell, swaying on his ruined right foot, and his one good hand scraped along the railing as though he had not yet decided which of them to want.

"Move away from it!" Aria shouted, and the girl, who had been jabbing her battered metal torch at the air in short, frantic arcs, stumbled sideways without taking her eyes off him.

"I can't get past, it's right there!" the girl cried, her voice cracking in the middle of the sentence.

"Then stop trying to fight it from where you're standing, and when I move, you run for that door," Aria said, easing one bare foot forward along the cold tiles.

"I'm not leaving you out here with that thing, I don't even know you!" The girl's knuckles had gone white around the torch.

"I'm not asking you to rescue me, I'm asking you to move before it gets hold of you," Aria answered, and then the creature's head swung toward her voice.

It came with a lurch, jerky and too fast for something so badly hurt. Aria remembered the old rule, that the brain was the only thing that ended it, but she could not reach its head without an opening, so she swung the lamp sideways and cracked it against the metal railing. The clang rang down the corridor, and the creature's whole body twisted toward the noise.

Aria went wide along the wall while its attention was still fixed on the railing, and she brought the lamp down across the back of its knee with all the strength her shaking arms had left. The leg buckled, though the creature did not fall, and it spun and flung out an arm that raked across her sleeve and tore the cotton to the elbow.

She slammed into the wall shoulder first, and the corridor swam in front of her, the carpet and the doors and the thing's grey face all sliding sideways at once. She blinked hard and tasted copper again.

Behind it, the girl had stopped screaming. She lifted the torch over her head and brought it down on the creature's shoulder blades, and it whirled toward her with a rattling snarl.

"Get back!" Aria gasped, pushing off the wall, and while the thing's head was turned away she stepped in and swung the lamp in a short, hard arc against its skull. The impact jarred her wrists to the shoulder, and the creature folded onto the carpet and lay still.

She stood over it for a long moment, chest heaving, watching for the twitch of a finger or the rise of a rib.

"Is it dead?" the girl asked, her torch still raised, keeping a good three metres of corridor between them.

"Don't come closer until I'm sure," Aria said, breathing through the pounding behind her eyes.

"You told me to run, but you nearly got yourself killed."

"And you nearly became its dinner because you wouldn't move when I told you," Aria said, wiping the warm wetness from her forehead with the back of her wrist. She saw red and realised the bandage had slipped.

"Are you bitten anywhere?" Aria asked, once the body had lain motionless long enough that she trusted it.

The girl pulled her arm against her chest. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because if you have been, I need to know what we're dealing with before we go anywhere together."

The girl hesitated, then held out her forearms with her jaw set as though she expected to be struck. "I haven't been bitten, I scratched myself when I fell, that's all."

Aria turned the thin wrists toward the light and studied the red lines across the skin. They were shallow, ragged and dirty, but there was no tooth pattern, no torn flesh. "These aren't bite marks," she said slowly. "Keep them covered, and tell me straight away if anything feels strange, even if it seems stupid."

The girl glanced at the body, then at the lamp. "You didn't have to come out there for me."

"I know." Aria shifted her grip on the brass, and the pain in her head flared. "But I wasn't going to stand behind a locked door and listen to you die."

"Maya," the girl said finally, looking at the carpet. "My name's Maya."

"Isabella," Aria answered, and the name sat strangely on her tongue.

The corridor had gone very quiet, and when Aria tilted her head she could hear, beneath the thud of her own pulse, a slow dragging sound rising from somewhere in the building.

"How long have you been here?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

"Since this morning. I was staying with my aunt on the second floor when everything, when the screaming started downstairs." Maya's gaze slid to the stairwell and stayed there, and her fingers worked at the grip of the torch until the plastic creaked.

"Where's your aunt now?"

"I don't know. We got separated." Maya wiped her nose on her sleeve and did not look up. "People came up the stairs, and she told me to go, and I, I went."

Aria watched her face but did not press. "Has anyone got out the front?" she asked instead.

"Not that I saw. There's too many of them by the lobby." Maya's voice thinned. "That's why I was trying to reach the stairs before that one found me."

A crash echoed from the floors below, followed by a long, ragged wail, and both of them flinched toward the railing. Aria crept to the edge and looked down into the stairwell, where the light was poor and something pale moved across the lower landing, then another shape behind it, though she could not tell how many.

"Not that way," she said quietly.

"There's a service staircase," Maya murmured. "Round the back, past the bins. It goes down to the loading bay."

Aria slipped back into the apartment for less than a minute, and Maya hovered at the door, watching the corridor over her shoulder. She snatched the cloth bag from the mat, tore a strip of gauze from the first-aid pouch and bound it tight across her forehead with her teeth clamped around the knot. From the wardrobe she dragged out a pair of flat leather shoes that fitted her stranger's feet better than they had any right to, and she jammed them on without bothering with the straps.

When she came back out, Maya was looking at the bag. "Are you taking all that?"

"Enough for two, if we're careful," Aria said.

"Why would you share it with someone you've just met?" Maya asked, her eyes narrowing.

Aria settled the strap over her shoulder. "Because two people watching each other's backs have a better chance than one person walking around with her eyes shut."

"And what happens when it all goes wrong?"

"Then we decide as it happens." Aria met her stare. "I can't promise you nothing will go wrong, but I can promise I won't leave you behind on purpose."

Maya chewed her lip, and her gaze flicked to the dead man, then to the apartment door, then back. At last she gave a short, jerky nod. "Fine. But I'm keeping my torch."

"I'd be worried if you weren't," Aria said, and she pulled the door shut behind them.

The service corridor was narrow and dim, choked with a mop bucket, a stack of broken chairs and a trolley on its side, and Aria picked her way through the clutter with the lamp raised and Maya's breath loud against her shoulder. At the far end a grey maintenance door stood closed, and a faint, wet scraping drifted from behind it.

"That's the service stair," Maya whispered, pointing past her. "That's the one."

"You're sure it leads to the loading bay?" Aria asked, keeping well back from the handle.

"My aunt always complained about delivery men blocking the entrance, so yes, I'm sure."

A heavy blow struck the other side of the door, and a fine rain of dust sifted down from the frame onto their hair.

Maya's fingers closed around Aria's sleeve. "Tell me that's somebody trying to get out," she breathed.

Aria stared at the shuddering metal. "I'd love to tell you that, but I don't think either of us will like the answer."

The handle began to turn.

A low, rattling growl rolled through the gap beneath the door, and Aria stepped back and put herself in front of Maya with the lamp lifted as high as her aching arms allowed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the main stairwell, but the wails drifting from that end of the building had grown louder.

"Please tell me you've got another way out," Maya whispered, her nails digging into the cotton.

"Not one that I can see," Aria said.

The maintenance door buckled inward with a shriek of bending steel.