Chapter Text
“Hey little bird, ten o’clock.”
Newt jerked his head around and spotted the Crank Alby was referring to. Not too bad, just a normal Crank. Its left leg was broken, so it half-limped, half-crawled toward him.
If he killed it, it might scream. Some of them did.
“I see it,” he said quietly, slipping around to the back of the convenience store they were trying to secure. He couldn’t risk making a noise. The Crank had probably already smelled him, but it looked to be alone.
Quietly, he climbed up on top of the Dumpster the building had used. His feet barely made a sound as he did; the boots on his feet had been worn soft by hundreds of such excursions.
The roof was a good ten feet above him, even from the top of the Dumpster. Not even he could jump that high. But automatically, his eyes found the cracks where mortar had fallen out from between bricks, the spaces where bricks had started to crumble.
“I’m going up,” he said.
“Newt, do not take your shoes off.”
He rolled his eyes. Alby worried too much. Even if he cut himself, no Crank blood could possibly be on the bricks. Cranks couldn’t climb. Without a word to the man on the other end of the line, he untied his boots and pulled them off his feet, tied the laces together, and draped the boots around his neck. Then he started to climb.
Alby called him a monkey sometimes, and for good reason. He could climb up virtually any surface. He didn’t need a major handhold; his fingertips and toes could support his weight when he needed them to, and he moved fast. Within thirty seconds he’d crested the top of the wall--
And almost jumped right back down.
He ducked his head out of view. “There’s a Crank on the roof,” he whispered.
Alby’s voice was instantly concerned. “Newt. Get your shoes back on and come down. We’ll take the store another day.”
He actually considered following the directive. Cranks were dangerous, for him at least. Alby was immune to the Flare virus, but they didn’t know about Newt and weren’t prepared to chance it. And if he was bitten, there was an eighty percent chance the virus would infect him if he turned out to be, like most humans, susceptible.
“No,” he said at last. “There’s only one. I can take it.”
Without waiting for an answer, he flung himself onto the roof.
Gravel dug into his bare feet, but he had thick calluses from running around barefoot most of his life. Nothing short of Crank teeth would cut his feet. And on that thought, he unsheathed the machete he wore strapped to his back and charged.
The Crank had seemed aimless, bumping up against the waist-high ledge around the roof over and over; but when Newt charged, it turned with surprising speed. Newt’s eyes went wide and he dove, barely escaping being grabbed as he rolled to the very edge of the roof and came up to standing facing the Crank. His boots dropped from his neck, landing where he’d hit the ground. His eyes flicked to them, then the Crank. One problem at a time.
“Newt, get back on the ground, now!”
“Can’t right now,” he said shortly, and braced himself, feet spread apart, knees bent, machete held out in front of him defensively. “Come on,” he muttered. “Come on.”
The Crank either heard or smelled him. Didn’t really matter which, Newt supposed. The end result was the same: It charged him.
At the last moment Newt stepped aside, swinging his machete in an arc that cut through the thing’s knee to the bone. He yanked his blade out, took a step back, and kicked the Crank in the small of its back. It toppled over the wall to the ground, shrieking at the top of its lungs.
Newt winced. Any Cranks who hadn’t known he was in the area did now.
No one knew why some Cranks retained more humanity than others--more mobility, or the use of their voice. The strangest ones were the ones that didn’t rot after their death, the Flare preserving them so that they seemed at first glance to be sleepwalking. Newt had heard rumors of Cranks who could pretend to be human, back when he’d been working solo.
Those had been hard days.
“Newt! Get your butt down here, now!”
“Can’t,” he said. The earpiece he wore picked up everything he said.
The earpieces were the reason they were here. They were running out of batteries for their walkies, and if they couldn’t contact each other in an emergency they were fucked for sure. The convenience store below them had displays on displays of batteries, but they had to get them now or be stuck without communication for however long it took.
“I’m going in,” he announced as he laced his boots back onto his feet, machete safely tucked away again. Without waiting for an answer he ran for the door, gravel crunching quietly under his feet, and opened it.
Inside, the convenience store was dark and broiling hot. Newt and Alby had had power for the two years they’d been working together thanks to one paranoid former tenant of their building who’d had a portable generator. Feeding that with gasoline had been easy; rationing the power had been hard. In other places, though, there was nothing. The government had kept certain utilities deemed necessary running as long as they could, but by now most of those were gone. No more internet, no more news, no more cell phone reception. Not that most people could have charged their phones anyway, but the reception had lasted a good six or seven months after the End of the World.
Newt always thought of it like that, with capital letters. It hadn’t been like in the movies, where one day everything was fine and the next the world was a mass of Cranks. But there had still been a day everyone could point to that the balance had tipped and Cranks had started outnumbering humans.
Thankfully, the convenience store only had one door that would open from the outside. Newt dragged as many carts as he could in front of it and left it for the moment. It would hold until he found something better.
He twisted his bag around so it was on his chest instead of his back, opened it up, and started piling supplies in. Canned food. Evaporated milk. And batteries, batteries, batteries.
There was a hardware store next door. They’d been planning to take that next, so they could secure the convenience store and come back any time. But it looked like that had been a pipe dream. With Cranks already converging on the convenience store, and more of them possibly inside, the priority was to get out now and worry about securing another supply stop later.
Unfortunately, Cranks had already arrived, pressing up against all the doors, both the automatic ones that hadn’t worked in almost four years and the manual one that only opened from the inside. There were a few of them that had figured out which one might open, but they weren’t getting past the carts. Yet.
Newt ran back to the back of the store, shoving open the Employees Only door, found the stairs he’d come down and ran up them. Nothing stopped him, thankfully. He made it to the roof--and then looked down.
Cranks had surrounded the building. They pressed against every wall and every window, looking for the source of the scream and the scent of fresh meat. All of them were hungry.
Cranks were always hungry.
Newt looked around through the crowd, trying to find an opening he could climb down. There wasn’t one. He could jump down onto the Dumpsters, but then he’d have a very small safe space where they couldn’t reach him, and no way to reach their necks to chop through them.
“Newt?”
“I’m thinking,” he said. He realized that he’d started to lift his thumb to his mouth to chew on the nail, and forced it back down. No chewing his nails when he'd been fighting Cranks a minute ago. If there was even a drop of blood on his thumb, he could get infected.
“Think faster, little bird. I only have so many bullets.”
“Don't waste any on this,” Newt said. His eyes went up, past the Cranks, until he found the hardware store one building over. There was a good ten feet between the buildings, and he'd have to jump off the ledge. It would be a hard jump. Hard, but not impossible. “I can make it,” he said.
“Newt, what are you--”
He didn't wait to hear the end of the sentence. He retreated to the edge of the roof, then started running.
Ten feet. Twenty. He was flying along the ground, feet skimming the surface, gravel crunching under his boots. Five feet from the ledge he jumped, planted his foot on the ledge for half a heartbeat, and flung himself into the air toward the hardware store.
“Newt!” Alby yelled over the walkie, but too late.
For a second he thought he’d make it. Then he reached the crest of his jump and started to descend. Too fast.
His chest hit the wall of the hardware store, arms flying over the edge. His chin banged into the ledge and stars burst in front of his eyes and he tasted blood. He scrabbled desperately, grabbing the corner of the ledge, bringing his feet up and trying to gain purchase in the cracks of the mortar. No good. No good. He was sliding down, chin scraped raw as it was dragged over rough brick and concrete.
Then he stopped, yanked to a halt as his fingertips latched onto the ledge.
“Newt!” Alby yelled again. “Newt, talk to me, are you okay?”
Stupid question. Especially given that he couldn’t really breathe after his collision with the ledge. But he had his hands working now. He wriggled until he had a better grip, then started pulling himself up.
He should have taken his boots off before jumping. Pulling himself up with only his hands was a lot harder than climbing when he had his feet. But he made it, after a few awful minutes. Finally he was safe, and he rolled onto his back on the roof and gasped for air.
“Newt, I swear, if you went and died on me--”
“Love you too, Alby,” he panted.
Dead silence.
“I hate you, shank.”
Newt grinned, rolling to his hands and knees, then climbing to his feet. “How are our friendly neighborhood Cranks?” he asked. “Still seething around the convenience store, or did they follow me?”
“Nah, they’re where you left them. Missing you already, no doubt. You have a plan besides giving me a heart attack?”
He laughed at that. “Don’t worry, Alby. I’m coming home. Me and my fresh supply of batteries.”
There was a pause, then, “I’m gonna kill you, you damn bird.”
This time, Newt took off his boots. Fuck the risk. He had a better chance of surviving a cut on his foot than he did a fall. If he didn’t die on impact, he’d be eaten alive.
He climbed down the opposite wall from the convenience store, landing quietly on the Dumpster, pausing to lace up his boots again before hopping down to the ground. He walked a good few blocks away before he risked speaking.
“Back on the ground, safe and sound. Meet you at home.”
“I will cook you and eat you, little bird,” Alby warned. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
“Relax, Grandmother,” Newt retorted. “I got the batteries we went in for and I didn’t get bit. I’ll be home in ten.”
His hands hurt, his chin hurt, and he seemed to have bitten a chunk out of his cheek when he hit. He didn’t even want to know how many bruises he’d have. But all of that was irrelevant. He was alive, and at the end of the world, that was what mattered.
Ahead of him came into view a six-story apartment building with a heavy gate in the front. In the old days the gate had been electric and mostly for show. Now, with Cranks running around, it was reinforced with a heavy chain and heavier padlock. Obviously, the way in wasn’t through the front door.
Cranks couldn’t climb, and except for a select few they were very bad with their hands. Humans had neither restriction. So Newt pushed open a window of a first-floor flat and climbed in, closing it behind him.
The elevator didn’t work, and it was a long climb to the sixth floor, but he made it up to the flat he and Alby had claimed. He would have flicked on the light, but it was already on, and a very angry Alby was standing in it, arms folded, glaring at Newt.
“You look like shit,” Alby said. “I wouldn’t call this ‘safe and sound.’”
Newt shrugged, dropping his bag to one side, keeping the machete on. “I’m alive,” he said. “Nothing’s broken.” At least he hoped it wasn’t. “And I didn’t get bit.”
“You could still have gotten blood in all those cuts,” Alby said.
“Not unless there’s a breed of Crank that can climb,” he retorted. “I hit a wall two stories off the ground.”
Alby shook his head. “Shirt off,” was all he said. “Hoodie too, and leave the machete. I’ll clean you up.”
Newt rolled his eyes but obeyed. He’d been tiny when he met Alby. The black boy hadn’t believed at first that Newt was fourteen and not ten. Even now that he was a full two inches taller than Alby, he couldn’t blame him for mothering him.
The entire city that Alby and Newt had holed up in was essentially deserted. It had been one of the first cities evacuated when the government took notice of the Flare and the Cranks it produced. The sick had been corralled into quarantine, the well put into refugee camps. By and large this had failed--the Flare had a longer incubation period than the government had banked on--but it had had the benefit of leaving survivors with large deserted areas to turn into livable camps. Some of them had managed better than others. Newt liked to think he and Alby had done better than most.
He sat down on the lid of the toilet, or what was theoretically a toilet. The government had tried to keep plumbing going everywhere so that any scattered survivors could use it, but the apartment’s water was temperamental and they’d learned not to rely on it. What came through usually had to be boiled anyway. Which was probably what Alby was doing out there--boiling water or tapping into their supply of bottled stuff so he could clean Newt’s wounds.
At least, that was what Newt thought until he heard a sound from the hallway.
His head snapped around. He wished he hadn’t taken off the walkie, but they turned it off in their flat to conserve precious batteries. If they ever ran out of the things, they’d have to move, and that would be hell. Newt liked this place.
He got to his feet, padding quietly toward the bathroom door. He paused, listening quietly. “Alby?” he whispered.
The boy must have been close. “I heard it,” he said. “Get your things back on. I’m going to check on it.”
Newt obeyed, slipping quietly out of the bathroom and scooping up what he’d dropped. Shirt and hoodie on, then machete. He consoled himself that it probably wasn’t a Crank. He’d never seen one clever enough to work the window, even if it could figure out where it was coming from. And if it did, it would have to have gone up the stairs.
It was possible. At least, if the rumors of human-seeming Cranks were true. It just wasn’t likely.
He kept up a running commentary in his head of why it probably wasn’t a Crank as he took a position right around the corner from the entryway. If anything got past Alby, it would be his job to stop it.
“Don’t shoot!”
The sound was so unexpected that he jumped. That was a voice. A human voice. Scared, too. Then again.
“Don’t shoot! We’re human, we’re immune!”
We?