[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 155. 06:44 hours.
Good morning.
Damian slept for eleven hours and twenty three minutes. This is the longest uninterrupted sleep he has had since waking from the coma and I consider it a significant positive development. His breathing was even throughout. His left leg stopped trembling sometime around 02:00 hours.
The infected at the fence line have reduced from approximately forty to nineteen overnight. Without a sustained signal to hold them several dispersed during the dark hours. Nineteen is still nineteen. But nineteen is better than forty.
Echo woke at 05:30, stretched, checked on Damian, checked on me, walked to the carpark barrier and looked at the nursing home for approximately forty seconds, then came back and sat down. I found this sequence of events notable.
I have been looking at the nursing home myself for most of the night.
Fourteen meters. One floor down. Across a shared fence line.
Today we go in.
End log.
[ DAMIAN ]
I woke up knowing where I was.
That was new. Every other morning since the coma had involved a moment of reaching before the present assembled itself. This morning it was just there. Carpark. CPIB. Level two. Nursing home fourteen meters east.
My left leg felt better than it deserved to.
Echo was already watching me when I opened my eyes, sitting a meter away with her ears forward and her tail doing one slow movement when she saw me register her. Theo-3 was at the carpark barrier looking out, amber eyes doing their quiet sweep of the surrounding area.
I sat up. Checked my body the way I had learned to check it since waking up. Left leg functional. Shoulder bruised from yesterday, stiff but usable. Everything else present.
I picked up the walkie talkie.
"You there," I said.
The response came in under three seconds. He had been awake. Probably hadn't slept. "I'm here. You're going in?"
"Tell me about the building. Layout. Where your friend usually goes."
A breath that carried relief and urgency combined. "Three floors. First floor is admin, common areas, a small medical supply room at the back. That's where he goes first. Medication for his knee, anti-inflammatories mostly, he knows exactly where they're kept." A pause. "He wouldn't stay on the first floor though. Too exposed. If something went wrong he would have gone up."
"Emergency staircase."
"East side of the building. Runs partially on the exterior. Its own door at ground level, separate from the main interior stairs. Less chance of infected using it because there's no direct internal access from the common areas."
"His name," I said.
A pause. "Reuben. Reuben Lee. Mid-twenties. Black hair, blonde highlights going faded now. He'll be scared but he's not stupid. If he's conscious he's hiding somewhere and waiting."
"What does he know about you sending someone."
"Nothing. I couldn't reach him." A pause that had something underneath it. "But he knows I wouldn't send anyone I didn't trust."
I looked at Theo-3. Theo-3 looked back at me.
"We're going," I said. "Stay on the frequency."
I clicked to standby and set the walkie talkie in the pack.
I looked at Echo.
She was already watching me. Ears forward. Reading the situation the way she always read situations completely, without pretending she hadn't.
"Stay here," I said.
She looked at me.
"I mean it. Stay."
She sat down. Didn't look happy about it. But she sat down.
I left the pack with her, kept only what I needed, and walked with Theo-3 toward the ramp.
[ NARRATOR ]
Getting from the CPIB carpark to the nursing home required going down first.
The infected at the fence line had thinned overnight. Nineteen remaining, distributed unevenly along the perimeter, the heaviest concentration at the front fence away from the shared boundary with the nursing home on the eastern side. Theo-3 had mapped their positions from the barrier during the night and identified the gap.
The shared fence line between the two buildings had a maintenance gate. Simple latch, not locked. The mechanism was clean of the rust that had claimed everything else in five months of Singapore humidity.
Reuben, most likely. Making his medication runs.
They moved down the CPIB carpark ramp to the ground level, kept close to the building, below the sight line of anything at the front fence, and reached the gate. The latch lifted clean. They were inside the nursing home grounds in eleven seconds.
The front garden had surrendered completely to five months of wet season without maintenance. Vines across the footpath. The small decorative trees gone sideways. A bench near the entrance half consumed by something green and fast-growing.
They moved along the eastern wall toward the emergency staircase.
Its door was at ground level, separate from the main entrance, exactly as described. Unlocked. They went in.
[ DAMIAN ]
The stairwell was dim and dry and smelled of concrete dust and something faintly medicinal. No infected. The sounds from inside the building were muffled here, the external structure providing its own separation from whatever was moving around in there.
We went up.
At the first floor landing Theo-3 checked the door into the building. "Two signals. Moving away from this access point."
Second floor landing.
I looked through the small window in the door. A corridor. Dim emergency lighting. Doors on both sides, most closed. A nurses' station at the far end, dark. No movement visible from this angle.
"Clear enough," I said.
I pushed the door open.
We stepped into the corridor.
We made it four steps.
The door on the left, third room down, burst open and two figures came through it moving with the coordinated urgency of people who had planned this and were executing it. Not panicked. Not desperate. Deliberate.
The first one went straight for Theo-3.
Both hands grabbing the back of his chassis, using momentum and leverage, finding the joint points with a knowledge of robot anatomy that was not accidental. He got behind Theo-3 and pinned his arms, the grip precise, the body positioning of someone who had been told exactly where to hold and had practised it.
Theo-3 could have broken it. I knew that. The man holding him probably suspected it. But breaking it meant hurting someone and Theo-3's arms stayed where they were put and that was that.
The second one came for me.
He was fast. Not infected-fast but trained-fast, the kind that comes from repetition, from someone who has put real hours into learning how to put people down quickly and efficiently. He covered the corridor distance in two steps and was already inside my reach before I had fully registered the movement.
His first strike caught my shoulder. Not a power shot. A redirect, classic opening, move the target off balance before committing the real attack. I went with the momentum instead of against it, turned into him rather than away, and brought my elbow up into the space where his chin was heading.
He pulled back fast. Good reflexes. He reassessed me in the half second he had and came in differently the second time.
Three strikes in sequence. Left, right, low. Drilled until automatic. I blocked the first two badly, the third catching my ribs on the left side and driving the air out of me in a way that reminded my body with specific clarity how recently it had been horizontal in a hospital bed for five months. I grabbed his wrist on the follow-through, stepped inside his guard, and drove my forehead into his nose.
He didn't go down.
He staggered back two steps, blood on his face, and looked at me with eyes that recalibrated fast and came back focused. This wasn't a scared survivor swinging wide and hoping. This was someone who had trained and kept training and had decided pain wasn't a reason to stop.
I respected it for half a second.
Then I stopped respecting it.
I went low, dropping below his expectation of my height, drove my shoulder into his midsection and took us both hard into the corridor wall. He got his arm around my neck on the way in, going for the choke immediately, good instinct, but I dropped my chin and got two fingers into the pressure point below his elbow and his grip broke and I spun out and caught him across the jaw with my right on the way around.
He hit the wall.
Stayed up.
I hit him again.
He stayed up again and came back and we went three more exchanges in the corridor, close and ugly and fast, neither of us with enough space to build any real power, both of us landing and absorbing and not going down. My ribs were filing complaints I wasn't reading. My left leg was reminding me of its current status. I stopped listening to both.
Then I heard it.
From behind me. The specific sound of something going wrong that wasn't part of my fight.
The man holding Theo-3 had looked toward the stairwell door. Something inside the building had heard us. The quality of movement behind some of the closed doors had changed, that shift from ambient drift to oriented purpose that happened when infected registered something to move toward.
The man made a decision.
He shoved Theo-3 with both hands and full bodyweight toward the stairwell door. Hard. Sudden. The push took Theo-3 through the door and onto the landing beyond it and I heard Theo-3 hit the stairs and the specific sound of him going down a flight before his balance could compensate.
The man I was fighting hit me across the face while I was processing that.
The punch landed clean. My vision went white at the edges. Not long. Not enough to drop me. But long enough.
Something came up from wherever it lived.
Cold. Focused. Very old. The part of me that seven years had built and the coma had not touched and the fog had not reached.
I looked at the man in front of me.
He looked back.
I locked in.
[ NARRATOR ]
What happened in the next forty seconds was not measured or careful.
It was not the deliberate patience of the MRT concourse where Damian had zip-tied four infected without raising his voice. It was not the soldier trying to remember what he used to be.
It was the soldier. Present tense. All of him, without the fog softening any of it.
He grabbed the man by his collar and ran him backward down the corridor. The man tried to plant his feet, got one good strike into Damian's left side, same ribs, the pain spiking white and disregarded. Damian kept moving, running him back, and when the fire door at the end of the corridor met the man's back the wire-reinforced glass pane did not hold.
It shattered outward.
The sound rolled through the building immediately. Glass breaking in a quiet structure, the alarm of it reaching every infected on every floor that hadn't already been moving toward the noise from the corridor fight. The ones behind the closed doors. The ones on the floors below.
The man slumped against the broken frame. Dazed. Glass in his hair. Blood on his hands from the edges of the frame.
The first man, the one who had pushed Theo-3, was moving back toward Damian now. Reassessing. Coming in.
Damian picked up the largest piece of safety glass from the corridor floor.
He drew it across the approaching man's forearm. Controlled. Not deep. A fact about the situation and what he was willing to do in it. Then he planted his boot in the man's chest and kicked.
The man went through the broken frame and into the stairwell beyond and the infected that had been coming up the stairs found him before he found his footing.
Damian turned to the first man still against the wall, still dazed, and looked at him for one second.
Then he turned away and faced the stairwell door on this side.
"THEO," he shouted. "GOING UP. NOT SAFE HERE. MEET ME AT LEVEL THREE."
He hit the emergency staircase door and ran.
[ DAMIAN ]
Level three door was locked.
I hit it with my shoulder. The frame flexed, the lock held. I hit it again. Same result. Something had been wedged against the other side, deliberate, someone who had secured this floor from the inside and had reasons for doing it.
From below in the stairwell I could hear infected. Multiple. The broken glass had pulled them from everywhere the building had been quietly holding them and they were coming up now.
I went up.
Level four.
This door opened.
I pushed through into a corridor identical to the ones below and pulled the door shut behind me and put my back against it and breathed. No movement. No sounds from inside the rooms. Dust on the nurses' station counter undisturbed in a way that said no one had been here recently.
I put my hands on my knees.
Let my lungs do what they needed.
Then I felt it.
Left side of my abdomen, low, below the ribs. Heat first, then pain as my body caught up. I straightened and looked down.
A piece of safety glass. Three centimeters, narrow, sitting in the flesh below my left ribs where the jacket had ridden up during the fight. Not deep. The blood was coming slowly, the dark seep of something that had not hit anything critical.
I looked at the nurses' station at the end of the corridor and started walking.
The medical room was small and undisturbed since January. I went through the cabinet without consciously thinking about what I was looking for. Field dressing. Antiseptic. Suture kit still sealed. Forceps. Saline wash.
I sat on the examination table.
Cleaned the wound. The antiseptic made my eyes water and I let them water and kept working. The glass came out clean with the forceps, one piece, intact. I packed the wound and looked at the suture kit.
My hands were already opening it.
I didn't know how I knew what to do. I just did it. The muscle memory of something that had been done before in conditions worse than this with less equipment and more urgency. The sutures went in imperfectly, I was doing it myself at an awkward angle, but they went in and they held and the bleeding slowed.
I sat back.
Looked at the scars already on my body. Old ones, distributed across my torso and arms with the geography of someone who had been in many places where things moved fast and sharp. I couldn't remember getting any of them. But my hands had just remembered how to close a wound without being asked.
I thought about that for a moment.
Then I stood up and walked to the door.
Something hit the back of my head.
Hard. The specific impact of something solid and swung with intention. My legs went out from under me and the floor came up and I went down on my hands and knees and tried to hold that position and couldn't.
I rolled onto my back.
Three of them. Standing over me, backlit by the emergency lighting, faces I couldn't resolve as my vision swam and tried to reassemble itself. One had a baseball bat. The others were just standing. Waiting. The specific patience of people who had already decided what was going to happen and were in no hurry about any of it.
The man on the radio.
The thought arrived with the particular clarity that a hard blow to the head produces. Simple. Direct. Without the softening that normal thinking applies to things that are bad.
He had sounded genuine.
He had sounded like a man who was scared for his friend and had run out of options and had asked for help because he had nothing left to do but ask.
Maybe that was true.
Maybe that was what they needed him to sound like.
His eyes closed.
And in the dark behind them, not a memory, not quite, but closer than anything had come before, a photograph. The shape of one. People arranged the way families arrange themselves when someone says smile, the composition of people who know each other well enough to know where they stand without being told.
He almost saw their faces.
Almost.
They dissolved before he could hold them. His mother. His father. Someone shorter standing close. His thatha. He knew them by position even without faces, by the specific gravity of people who had always been there.
And at the edges, not family, ... two shapes.
Pale amber glow.
A dog with her ears forward.
Theo and Echo.
Those he could see clearly.
Those his mind held even as everything else went dark.
End of Chapter 14