I rewind her rage and her joy as the door blows, taking down the first attacker, and catch an echo of earlier memories: the memory of sex, the memory of her white-lightning orgasm as she broke Evan’s neck while sitting astride his lap, in a moment of total exultant control over everything she hated. I squeal and try to shove her out of my head but it’s too late, because she’s lying halfway through the doorway with bloody tears trickling from her eyes. I killed her and I’m going to have to live with that.

I retch at the overpowering stench of blood and shit and worm my way out from under the truck. My hearing is all fuzzed from the explosion and the gunfire, which has died down. I’ve got a job to do, dammit. The fire is suppressive, to convince the people holed up inside to stay down. That’s the plan, anyway. What were Steve and I meant to do, in the office . . . ?

Oh, that.

I kneel, then stagger to my feet and lurch forward, slip-sliding on a loop of intestines until I catch my balance and crunch down on the dead woman’s rib cage. There’s another dead body behind the desk, wearing a security guard’s uniform: he’s been dead for some time, going by the way he’s dark to my vision. I briefly consider raising him and using him as a proxy, but it’d take too long to summon a feeder.

There’s a fuse box on the wall beside the inner door, the one that leads to the archive. I open it and look for the circuit breaker I helped the electrician connect this morning. It’s still open.

Flick.

Inside the archive, the string of ultraviolet lights we laid along the top of the storage racks this morning blink on.

And then the screaming starts.

• • •

THE REST OF THE MOP-UP OPERATION GOES SMOOTHLY ENOUGH, modulo the mopping up. Which is . . . disturbing.

The screaming from inside the warehouse is continuous, high-pitched, and terrible. It’s the kind of sound you associate with cats being skinned alive, or slasher movies, or mediaeval torture-fests.

I open the door.

Alex is moaning with fear, not screaming. He lies curled in a ball on the floor beside the doorway, hoodie pulled up, hands and face tucked in. Clever boy. His ward’s toast, so I have to assume he’s been turned, but right now he’s focussed on keeping his hands and face out of the light that burns. He’s smoking, but the duck’n’cover drill combined with his hoodie seems to have saved him from going the full barbie.

There’s the characteristic black dome of a powered-up ward at one side of the warehouse. Later.