Kiris closed the door.

There had been at least ten of them, but they’d been quite busy with beating, biting and stomping on their prey. Gaylen thought none of them had looked their way. Presumably, someone with access had tried to seek shelter in the back rooms, only to not quite make it.

“Well, shit,” Jaquan whispered.

“The lift,” Gaylen said, whispering as well. He turned. “No other choice.”

“Kiris, can you do it?” Jaquan asked as they went down.”

“No other choice,” the golden woman repeated.

She had her breaker out before they reached the fourth floor again. The hallway was still clear of marbozi, but that wouldn’t last long. She extracted a node from the little device and attached it to the lift’s panel, then started the work of breaking the electronic lockout and gaining access.

She collected various skills, sort of like a hobby, in addition to the one she was gifted with simply through her genes. But opening things was the main one of those.

Jaquan stood next to her, guarding the stairs with his heavy wrench. Gaylen stood behind her back, and focused down the hallway.

Six bullets. Only six.

The marbozi were a constant, muffled din. The breaker, meanwhile, was completely silent. There were no little warbles of failure or progress. Kiris had it set to silence. What burglar didn’t? Nor did she comment on her work. Their lives depended on it, and Gaylen was glad she wasn’t allowing herself any distractions. The only sounds were the shifts of her fingers over the panel of the breaker. And the screaming. The ever-louder screaming.

The marbozi arrived at the door leading down to the third floor. The beating started immediately, and the door started cracking much faster than the previous one.

Kiris’s work continued, silent and unseen as Gaylen watched their doom get closer. A third of the door was coming loose, and he found himself facing an awful question. Would his friend and his lover be better served by skilful use of his limited ammunition, or by him saving the two last bullets for them?

Would he be able to do it? If he did, at least he would not have to feel bad about it for long. Because the horde would be on him a second later.

An arm with a bloodied fist at the end of it came into the hallway as that piece of the door came loose. The marbozi on the other side waved the appendage and roared, as he tried to squeeze through. After a few seconds of that it occurred to his ravaged brain to grab the little shelving unit they’d thrown in front of the door.

Gaylen didn’t turn around, or say anything. Nothing he could do would speed the process up. He just raised the pistol, held it in both hands, and readied his shot.

The unit spent a couple of seconds shaking and moving as it became the focus of the marbozi’s rage. Then it moved a bit, and that allowed the marbozi to break more fully through the door. His ilk were crammed together right behind him, but he was the first to make it out into the hallway. He stumbled a bit, but managed to keep his momentum going. The unit had fallen in a way that still blocked the door a little, and the obstruction held out for a few more seconds.

The lead marbozi got into a run. A screaming, wobbly, limb-flailing run, straight at Gaylen.

He lined up the shot, reviewed what he understood about the weapon’s performance, and watched the man come. As he was halfway across, the door fully gave way and the rest came in. Three-fourths of the way, and the flood started in earnest.

As he was nearly on them, Gaylen pulled the trigger, and blew out what remained of the man’s brains. He went down, and slid to a stop at Gaylen’s feet.

There was a small ding behind him.

“Got it,” Kiris said.

Gaylen shot another marbozi, at a slightly longer range than the previous. Then he heard the door open.

He was the last inside the elevator. He aimed the gun again, and fired again, between the eyes of the leading marbozi. Then the door slid shut, and they heard the banging of fists before the car started rising.

“It was on our floor,” Kiris said, and tucked away her breaker. Then she slumped against a wall, and let out a shaky sigh.

“We’re not out of this yet,” Gaylen said.

“This car only goes up to the twenty-second floor,” Jaquan pointed out. “Maybe… maybe that was the original structure.”

“It will give us a big lead,” Gaylen said. “Actually…”

He took in the sound and feel of the elevator.

“Maybe not. Damn, this thing is slow. But at least they’ve lost us for now.”

“So, we…” Kiris cleared her throat. “Destroy their brains? That is the solution?”

“Or the spinal column,” Gaylen said. “Or the heart, probably, if you do it thoroughly enough.”

“Probably?” Jaquan repeated.

“I’m not an expert on brown jendra. But they’re not magic. It’s just… they regenerate like crazy. That’s why they don’t go down when they should.”

He looked at the crude pistol in his hand.

“If we had plasma, this would be easier. But we don’t.”

The floors crawled by. He stopped talking, and the others added nothing. Jaquan examined his cutter, and Kiris made adjustments to her clothes, making sure nothing would get in the way. The hood had come off her head at some point in all the excitement, and she tucked it away and fastened her hair more firmly.

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Gaylen checked his hazardous material detector, then touched his mask.

“We can take these off,” he said, and revelled in finally being able to breathe properly. He collapsed the mask and put it in his belt, and the other two did as well.

“Oh, look.”

It was Oleg’s voice, coming from a small speaker up by the roof. Gaylen squinted and thought he saw a camera as well.

“I was just cycling through and saw that an elevator was moving. I wasn’t expecting it to be you three. Hardly my top priority, but it only takes the flick of a switch to make things more interesting.”

The elevator stopped, and its main lights went out. The panel went dead.

“Bastard,” Jaquan said.

“I think there was an escape hatch,” Gaylen said.

They only had the barest of emergency lighting, but as he hopped up and swiped his hand through the air he did feel a dangling cable. He hopped again and caught it, and pulled. The hatch opened, and he saw darkness up above, punctuated by dim little lights.

“I’ll boost you up,” he said. “We’ll keep on going, on the maintenance ladder.”

Kiris was first, and she stepped into his intertwined fingers and clambered up through the opening. Jaquan went second, and she made things easier by pulling at him. Gaylen then hopped up, and they both pulled on him.

“Do either of you have plans for how we’ll actually open the elevator doors at the top?” Kiris asked.

“These aren’t designed for hard security,” Jaquan said. “They ought to pry apart with a bit of effort. And if it takes more than a bit, then I do have the tool for it.”

“Makes sense that you would.”

“Of course it does.”

There was a narrow ladder built into each side of the shaft, and Gaylen stepped up to the one that ran left of the doors and started climbing. He was feeling the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush, in shaking limbs and a thundering heart. But experience had taught him to handle it, and he just minded each movement carefully as he ascended. After him came Jaquan, with his possibly-needed tool belt, then Kiris.

There was a bit of a ledge, rimming the shaft at each door, but it was distressingly narrow. Maintenance crews presumably wore safety gear of some sort. A plaque on the wall told him they were passing by the fourteenth floor. The doors were indeed not built for security, and he could hear the din of the marbozi through them.

He couldn’t tell if the main horde had already gotten this high up, or if the noise was carrying through crawlspace or piping. And ideally, he wouldn’t find out at all.

“That sheen…” Kiris said. “What do you know about it?”

“Eh. I told you I’m not an expert,” Gaylen said. “But you’ve seen they don’t attack each other. Mostly. Supposedly it has something to do with scent.”

“I don’t suppose we could replicate that trick?” she mused.

“It has to be, ah!” Gaylen’s foot slipped a little. “It has to be a liquid form of the gas. Concentrated. I think if we tried, we’d just end up as marbozi ourselves.”

“Don’t want that.”

“No,” Gaylen said grimly as they reached the fifteenth floor. “We don’t.”

It was then that he heard Oleg’s voice again. It was through the elevator doors, heavily amplified by speakers. The man was making use of some announcement system or another, and presumably addressing the remaining survivors, whose desperate voices and moving feet Gaylen could just barely hear over Oleg.

“Just in case you think I’m talking to hear the sound of my voice: Don’t worry, I’m not that vain. It’s just that your pursuers are drawn to the human voice. It’s one of the few things they still recognise, it seems. So you folks just keep running, and I’ll keep switching between speakers. Don’t want them to lose you, do we? This is going to be a thorough cleansing.”

The awful din of the marbozi wasn’t far behind. Gaylen thought of Bers. As ferocious as the man was, he was still a man. He drew on the animal that lurked in the human soul, but that was still within the bounds of nature. The marbozi… it was a mutilation of the brain. It was sickness, and for a moment he found himself hoping that the gassing victims weren’t to any degree aware of their state.

But he quickly shut that down, and focused his concerns on his friends. He took peeks down below, and found things pretty much as he’d expected. Jaquan was managing, but struggling a bit, and Kiris was tight on his heels.

At the sixteenth he heard shouting and banging through the elevator doors. It wasn’t the marbozi. It was someone demanding to be let in somewhere. And that was when the shaft’s internal speakers came to life again.

“I switched back to you guys,” Oleg said. “I see you’ve left. Well, let me help you along.”

There was a thud-like noise of machinery coming back online. The elevator started up again. It was coming for them. Gaylen spent a single second assuring himself that there wasn’t enough space for them between the car and the walls. Then he started climbing as fast as he could.

Suddenly that car didn’t seem so slow after all.

Climb, climb, climb, you bastard, climb.

He reached the seventeenth floor, but through the elevator door came the sounds of slaughter in progress, loudly enough that it didn’t seem like the backrooms were serving as a buffer. He continued on.

“Go faster, Jaquan!” Kiris shouted, down at the bottom of their little queue.

He reached the eighteenth, and heard yet more horror, though a bit more muted. He took another peek down, and decided to risk one more floor.

“Just a little more!” Gaylen said to his friends. “Just one more!”

His foot slipped again in the haste, and for a moment he swung to the side by one hand. He swung himself back, his foot narrowly missing Jaquan’s head, and finished the climb.

He stepped over onto the thin ledge, but had to keep his hands tightly on the doorframe to feel the least bit secure in his footing. He pressed himself to the front of the doors and shifted his fingertips to the crack between them. The fighting gloves did improve his grip, and he put all his strength into pulling the doors apart.

The elevator car was coming, and so were his friends. At first it seemed that this was it. That the doors were too firmly closed, and that Jaquan wouldn’t have the time to bring his tool to bear.

But then he felt a bit of give, and found yet more strength right next to a burst of hope. He got his fingers further in between, for a still better grip, and the doors started parting faster.

“Coming!” Jaquan said, as he put his organic foot over onto the ledge. He put both hands on the left-side door, and pushed his metal leg against the right-side one. It didn’t double the force in play, but it did speed the process up, and they forced the doors fully open.

Gaylen went through, took Jaquan’s hand and helped him inside. Then both of them took Kiris’s hands and yanked.

The elevator car passed by, out of sight, then stopped as the power within the shaft died again. They wouldn’t be climbing any higher.

Gaylen took stock, and realised that they also wouldn’t be hiding in the backrooms anymore. For whatever reason, they didn’t reach this high in the building. Before them was a main floor.

They were still in the trade league portion of the Red Tower. Logos and signs made that much clear. He thought this might be some sort of office area, but he didn’t care enough to ponder the matter. What mattered was that the hallways were quite open, and that the doors were marked as locked. These were the off-hours, after all. So there was no place for them to hide. So it was back to running.