He looked back at the assembled crew, said, “Worse comes to worst…” and cocked his head at the Daisy, just sticking up over his shoulder. “But let’s keep it softer than that if we can. Just two blocks. ”
“Two blocks,” Briar echoed. She swallowed hard, and told herself that she was making progress. She was getting closer. She was headed toward the neighborhood where her son might have gone, and that was a step in the right direction.
Swakhammer took Lucy’s candle and drew the door inward. The whole line of people behind him retreated half a step at a time, giving him room.
Outside the world was perfectly black.
Briar could’ve guessed that much from the inky interior of the apothecary’s shop, but she’d assumed that the debris-cluttered windows and the filthy glass might make a grim illusion. She hadn’t realized how late the day had become. “It’s night,” she breathed with some amazement.
Lucy reached over and squeezed Briar’s shoulder. “It takes some getting used to,” she whispered back. “Being underneath, it’s hard to tell the time; and God knows the days are short enough during the winter. Come on, sweetheart—it’s still Saturday, technically anyhow. Onward and upward. Over at the Vaults, maybe somebody will know about your boy. But first, we’ve actually got to get there. One thing at a time, right?”
“One thing at a time,” she agreed.
Swakhammer extinguished the last candle with a reluctant pinch of his leather-gloved fingers against its wick. As he drew the door wide enough to let himself out, Briar held her breath and waited for the night to try to kill them all.
But nothing happened.
Swakhammer hustled the group out the door and pulled it closed behind them, making sure that only the smallest click announced the seal. Then he turned back and growled so low that he could scarcely be heard, “Hold close. Hold hands if you can stand it. We’re going one block north and one block west. Miss Wilkes, you and that repeater should bring up the rear. Don’t be too quick to shoot. No noise if possible. ”
Her hat brushed against the stone storefront as she nodded, and that was all Swakhammer needed to hear. He could barely see her, but she hadn’t objected. Briar retreated to the back of the line and pulled the Spencer off her shoulder, so she could hold it poised and ready to fire.
In line behind Hank, who was seemed on the verge of falling asleep where he stood, Briar tried to keep watch on both directions at once. But Hank fell behind and lost his place, and Briar shoved him back into position.
He was dragging, and she couldn’t afford to be dragged. She didn’t know where she was going, not really—and certainly not at night, in the dark, when she could not see the shifting forms of her companions. She could not see the sky above,
not even the yellow tubes that she knew must sprout up into the air; and only if she squinted through the smudged lens of her cumbersome old mask could she detect the jagged outlines where the rooftops and spires of the crumbling buildings stood black against the clouds above them.
But she couldn’t look long. Hank was sliding back down, knocking his skinny shape against the walls.
She caught him with one hand, and propped him up with the rifle while she tried to steady him. Stupid goddamn drunk, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. She used all her weight to hold him in a semistanding position.
“What’s the matter, Hank?” she asked, pushing and shoving, and using her own limbs as crutches to keep him on his feet.
He groaned in response, but it didn’t tell her anything except that he’d had too much of the miserable yellow beer and now it was hurting him. She wished she could see to help, but it was hard to see, and harder to help when he swatted her hands away and rolled himself along the wall.
“Hush up back there!” Swakhammer ordered, the metal in his voice cutting the hiss to a whistling demand.
“I’m trying to keep him—,” Briar started to say back, and stopped herself. “Hank,” she whispered to him, instead. “Hank, get yourself together. You’ve got to walk. I can’t carry you. ”
He moaned again and seized at her hand.
She thought he meant to use it to push himself forward, and that was fine; she helped nudge him that way, back into his spot in the frightened, shuffling queue. But the moan stuck in her mind and it itched there, as if it ought to be telling her more than she’d heard at first.
Hank stumbled again and she caught him again, letting him lean on her shoulder as he ambled along. One foot kicked against the other and he crumpled to the ground against the curb, dragging Briar down with him.
She clutched at his hand and he clutched back. To the others, whose footsteps were scraping onward and away, she called out, “Wait!” in the loudest whisper she dared.
A jostling stop signaled that she’d been heard.
“What is it?” Lucy asked. “Where are you, honey?”
“Back here, with Hank. There’s something wrong with him,” she said down into his hair, for his face was pressed against her collarbone.
Lucy swore. “Hank, you idiot old drunk. If you get us killed, I swear, I’m going to kill you. ” As she spoke, the volume of her hushed recriminations rose in time with the impatient patter of her approaching feet. Some stray spark of light—some wayward, determined moonbeam or reflection from a window—kicked against an exposed bit of Lucy’s metal arm and glinted there, revealing her position.
Briar only half saw it. Her attention was elsewhere, caught in the straps that bound the head of a hungover man with little sense of self-preservation.
“Wait,” she said to Lucy.