Long lines begin to crowd at the bridges, which are too narrow and fragile to take that many people at a time. The bridges were constructed long ago out of whatever material could be scavenged and are for people to travel back and forth between the roofs of buildings, to avoid the potentially dangerous streets. They weren’t made for this. Some snap and fall apart, spilling people to the ground, stories below, where hungry dead attack them, tearing at their limbs as they scream and fight. Any survivors may as well be dead. It will only take one bite to turn them Unconsecrated.
It’s hard to avoid looking, impossible not to watch the struggle taking place so many flights beneath us. I try to focus on Elias’s back and the feel of Catcher and his heat behind me, but the sounds and the smell are too much—the metal taste in my mouth and the screaming of the living.
Someone pushes up against me, knocking me down, and someone else steps on my hand, the weight grinding my knuckles. I scream and lash out. A third person reaches for me and at first I think he’s trying to help me up but then he wrestles for my machete, trying to pry it from my belt.
As I’m twisting away from the man’s grasp, Catcher swings at him, fist slamming into his jaw without hesitation. The man stumbles back and Catcher lifts me up as we press forward into the crowd.
In some places children stand motionless, wailing for mothers they can’t find. In others men stand along the edges of roofs and stare at the Neverlands as if they can’t believe what’s coming. As if they can’t fathom so many dead.
People beg for help, wanting to know what they should do and where they should go, but I don’t know what to tell them and so I say nothing. It’s like being caught in a deluge, following the crowd east as the buildings around us grow taller, some of them only rusted-out husks of what they used to be. Old steel beams spire above, their ragged ends sharp and broken.
Midway across the island, the bridges snake erratically around obstacles, weaving several blocks south before turning back east. Most everyone is heading for the docks farther south, but the Sanctuary is on an island directly east of the Dark City, which means we’re forced to shove across the crowds to head in that direction. It’s impossible. People scream at us, one man even swinging at Elias before we give up and descend a fire escape to the street. Down here it’s easier to move faster, fear driving the masses to the air.
A few blocks away I hear the pounding scrape of Unconsecrated feet. There are so many of them that the ground shudders, their moans so many voices that it creates a discordant vibration through the air. It’s louder than the most violent rainstorm, a thundering hissing mass of bodies and need.