They piled up everything they found in the center of the room.

Clint felt like a massive idiot when Malina reached onto one of the bottom shelves and produced an AK-47 and three spare boxes of ammunition. The gun clattered against the concrete floor as she tossed it down.

“This,” she told him, sternly, “is why we always look thoroughly in this game. Neither one of us can afford to die.”

“You don’t have to lecture me,” Clint muttered, embarrassed.

“Yes, I do. If you had looked better, I might not have gotten shot.” And she skirted past him to check the other shelf.

Clint tried not to let his irritation show. A dozen counterarguments rose and died on his tongue. He understand her intensity. He'd be just as mad if she'd almost cost him Rachel. So he palmed the anger out of his eyes and held his hand there for a moment, just breathing.

He said, “Do you think she’s going to come back for us?”

“Oh, almost certainly.” Malina picked through the stack, tossing aside things she randomly declared unimportant: water and food, shirts, a can of pepper spray. Clint grabbed one of the shirts off the ground and replaced his ruined sweater with it. This shirt was plain black, long-sleeved, and not coated with a stranger’s brain matter, which made it infinitely better than his hoodie already. “We’d be best off going clear to the other side of the level.” She glanced at her watch. “I don’t even know why I wear this damn thing. It resets itself every time you look at it.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to fuck with us. I’ve learned Death loves to fuck with us.” She stared down at her watch again, but she didn’t take it off. As though there was a comfort there in the ghost of normalcy.

“Where should we go?” Clint ventured.

“We’ll find an empty house. Huddle down until she stops her roving parties.” Malina offered Clint the gun and asked him, “Do you recognize this?”

“It’s… it’s a gun.”

Malina rolled her eyes. “This is an AK-47.” She tapped a lever on the side and flipped it up. “Safety on.” Flipped it down. “Safety off. Don’t fucking point it at yourself or me when you’re checking it. Actually, just don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill.” She put the switch back up. She showed him how to remove the magazine (empty), how to refill it with the bullets big as Clint’s pinky and sharp as a fang.

Clint watched her with mute fascination and dread. He still remembered the way the light in that man’s eyes had gone from bright and drawn with shock to nothing at all. How little time it had taken him to waste to death on the floor of that basement.

“What’s that look for?” she asked. “Are you scared of guns, now?”

“No. No, it’s not that.” Clint took the gun from her and slung it over his shoulder. The weight grounded and terrified him all at once. It was a promise and a threat: he could keep himself safe, but he may have to kill somebody again. “It’s just… I’ve never killed anyone before.”

Malina snorted at him. “Do I seem like a hardened killer or something?”

“No! No. It’s just… it’s a lot.”

She gripped Clint’s shoulders, firmly, and stared at him hard until he met her eyes. “Look,” she said. “Everyone in here is already dead. You’re not killing anybody.”

“I’m stopping someone from being able to go back to life.”

“Yeah, an asshole who tried to kill you for no reason.”

“I’m an asshole who actually killed a guy for no reason,” Clint muttered.

Malina punched his chest. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You know you had to do it, and if you waste all this time mourning some random dickhead with a gun you’ll never get out of here.”

Clint stared down at her, injured.

“What? Do you want a fucking sympathy card? It’s not a tragedy if you kill someone who was fully intending to murder you.” She slung off her own backpack and began stuffing it with a few packages of bandages. “Start packing up. We have to keep moving.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Clint dropped to his knees beside her and started filling all the pockets of his backpack. Malina divided everything up more or less evenly between them, though she didn’t offer him either of the grenades that she found. Instead she tossed him the bottles of opiates, the little container of rubbing alcohol, and the bulletproof vest, which was dusty and felt too flimsy to really stop a bullet, but he supposed it had to be better than nothing. Clint strapped it over his chest tightly.

He asked her, trying not to sound tense, “Do you know how to use a grenade?”

“Better than you do. You barely know how to use a gun.”

“Hey, I was pretty good at baseball, back in high school.”

“This isn’t a baseball.”

“I understand the general concept.”

Malina snorted. She pulled one of the grenades out of her backpack’s side pocket and slapped it into his hand. “Prove it sometime, kiddo.”

“I’m twenty-three,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah.” She smirked, elbowed his ribs. “Kiddo.”

Clint couldn’t help his smile. The tension unwound from his shoulders like barbed wire unhooking itself from his skin. He followed Malina out the back door.

“It will take us a few hours.” Malina regarded her broken, useless watch again. Smiled over her shoulder at Clint, but the light of it never reached her eyes. “It takes a while to walk all the way around the map, particularly if we don’t want to be seen.”

He remembered the shitty old jeep that Florence and her gang had been in. He ventured, “Is there some way to find a car like they had?”

She cackled. “Florence’s. She’s got everything with wheels in this goddamn level.” Malina flipped open her map and tapped the far northern edge of the circles, where the houses grew sparse, and the map had only a few ticked lines that looked like grass. A huge swath was boxed and scratched out in thick graphite. “That’s her main base.” Malina tapped the center of the rectangle. “If you go there, you’ll die close enough to instantly.”

Clint sighed through his teeth. “Then I guess we’re walking.”

They walked together, setting out west, away from Malina’s home. The sun was bright and hot in the sky, but it never seemed to move. It only hung there, watching them.

For a long time, they walked in silence through backyards and flowerbeds. At one point Clint heard the faraway wail of an engine and pulled Malina down before she fully noticed. They crouched down behind a shed as a pair of jeeps packed with men roared past them, never stopping or slowing.

“They’ll start fanning out once they’ve realized we’re not there.” Malina looked anxiously over her shoulder, even though they were too far now to see her house. Clint pulled his map out of his pocket and looked it over. He’d managed to fill barely a quarter of his circle, and even though there were at least forty or fifty little squares of houses standing between him and Malina’s home, but it didn’t seem like nearly enough space.

They kept going, moving quickly now. Clint gripped his rifle by the handguard. The metal was smooth, cold, reassuring. Even if he didn’t want to shoot somebody, he could. And there was safety in that.

Malina was the one to notice the smoke. Clint was looking only forward, scouring every fleeing shadow for the hint of another human being. But she grabbed his elbow and pointed backwards.

A thick black column of smoke was rising into the air in the distance.

“They’re trying to burn us out,” she muttered. “It won’t be long until they realize we’re not there.”

Clint watched the smoke spread like a warning. He swung his rifle around so he could hold it in both hands, the butt nestled against his shoulder. But he kept the muzzle pointed down toward the earth, his finger firmly off the trigger. “What do we do, then?”

Malina scoffed. “Are you going to try to be a two-against-ten?”

“Well, no—”

“Then obviously we’re going to hide.”

They were in another random backyard, and the suburban maze felt so thick that Clint could barely make sense of it anymore. If it weren’t for his map, he would have been lost hours ago, looping through backyard after backyard, trying to remember which little cottage he’d been to last.

But Malina strode confidently to the back door, which was a pleasant yellow thing with gingham curtains. (Rachel would have declared it so cute.) She rattled the handle. When it didn’t move, she raised a boot and kicked it down. A couple of the glass panes popped and shattered, and the frame splintered.

The door swung inward.

Malina hollered inside, “We’re not here to hurt you! Florence’s gang is trying to fucking murder us.”

“Is there anyone even here?” Clint whispered, anxiously, lifting his gun up.

“I don’t know. But I’d be sure as hell about to shoot anyone who kicked down my back door.” Malina glanced over her shoulder and shied away from Clint and his rifle. “What did I tell you about not pointing that shit at people you don’t want to kill?”

Clint flustered and decided not to argue. This house was small and pleasant and reminded him distinctly of his grandmother’s house. There were patterned tea towels, frames of pressed flowers, family pictures of strangers. Clint watched the faces as he passed and wondered if they were dead or alive.

They swept through the first floor of the house and found nothing. The second floor was equally barren, barring a single toothbrush sitting on the bathroom sink. He left it there and met Malina in the hallway.

“There’s an attic,” she told him. “I want you to cover me, and I’ll check it out.”

Clint bit his lip, hard. “Is that the safest idea?”

“Oh, are you worried about me?” Her smile was charmed and derisive.

Before Clint could argue, the television downstairs turned itself on. They both froze at the crackle and pop of static.

Malina pressed a finger to her lips. She raised her shotgun and crept back down the hallway to the top of the stairs. Clint followed her, trying to velvet his steps. He watched the line of Malina’s shoulders, trying to see from her body language if anyone was there before he turned the corner with her.

But the living room was empty. The television screen swelled with flickering black and white.

“What the fuck,” Malina started.

And then Death appeared on the screen. He looked distinctly disappointed. “Honestly,” he said, “I thought you humans would be much faster at this. No one’s even gotten close to the second level yet.” He spread his hands and smiled, generously. “I suppose it’s time I gave you a hint.”