What You Carry: New Antwerp

Infection is not a sickness and not a countdown. A person who has it is a carrier: no fever, no mark, no change in who they are, for as long as they live. Most carriers would die of something else, years from now, if the city let them.

It travels in body fluids. The dead pass it by a bite, or their blood or bile in a wound, an eye or a mouth. A living carrier passes it through any fluid of theirs: blood, spit, sweat, tears, vomit, sex. A kiss, a shared canteen or a sweaty grip will do it. Dry touch and shared air are safe.

What it changes is the end. A carrier who dies, of anything, gets back up. Those two facts are why Vickery tests everyone at its gate and lets no carrier in, why the Stacks treat everyone as a carrier, and why Dismas Island locks everyone in at night.

Every carrier rises. It does not matter what killed them: a fall, a bullet, pneumonia, old age in a bunk. The body lies still for a few minutes, rarely as long as ten, and then it gets up as one of the dead and knows nobody.

One thing prevents it: destroying the brain, before or after. People call that finishing. A carrier whose skull was crushed in dying stays down. So does anyone who dies clean. The uninfected dead are only dead.

So a death is never private. At the Stacks everyone has a second, the person who has promised to finish them, and asking is the nearest thing the port has to a vow. On Dismas Island whoever dies in the night rises behind a locked door. At Vickery, where everyone tested clean, a death inside the wire is finished anyway: a month is a long time between tests.

Nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island knows where it came from, nor does anyone on the radio. There is no cure, no vaccine and no known immunity. Nobody has been bitten and tested clean. Nobody living knows why the dead come in kinds, why the city's dead keep changing, why a few carriers go early, or what is left beyond the city.

What exists is guesswork: Major Albescu's notes, rumours on the radio net, sermons on the island, and whatever a frightened person needs to believe.

For the narrator this is a rule. Do not reveal an origin, a lab, a first case, a cure, a vaccine or an immune person, and do not let any character know one for certain. What the dead do among themselves is the dead side's to tell, never a living mouth's. Characters may guess, argue, lie and hope.

A few carriers turn without being killed first. It is rare: the Stacks have seen five since the first spring, the island three. People call it going early.

It always starts as a fever. For about three days the carrier burns, sleeps badly and stays themselves. Then the fever breaks and they go back to work, or it kills them and they rise like any dead carrier. So the rule holds even here: the fever kills first.

Nobody can tell that fever from flu, a bad tooth or a dirty cut. At the Stacks a fever goes to an empty container with a cot and a chain, and the sick one's second sits outside until it ends. On the island the sick one stays locked in by day too. At Vickery a fever means a test, and a cartridge spent. Hiding a fever is the most dangerous thing anyone can do, and people do it.

The dead are what a carrier becomes. As far as the living can tell, nobody is in there: none the living have met talks, uses a tool or works a latch.

• They go for any living person, carrier or clean, and they bite.
• They come to sound first, then movement, then light. A gunshot carries a mile.
• They do not tire, sleep or feel wounds. Only destroying the brain stops one.
• They ignore each other, except to crowd one of their own just finished; nobody knows why.
• Alone, most are slow and a blade handles them. People die of numbers, of noise and of the one they did not see.

Most are walkers; sixteen other kinds have names and four shapes have none. In the city the herds move as if steered, and some things are seen only once. Animals were long thought safe. Cold slows all of them.

The ordinary dead, and nearly all of them: upright, slow, never stopping. A walker covers ground at the pace of a tired man and keeps it up for days. It cannot climb, run or work a door handle, but it will lean on a door until the frame gives.

One walker is a chore for anyone with a blade and room to swing. Walkers kill by arithmetic. Each sound brings more: they fill an avenue from both ends, come up the subway stairs and down the stairwells of the towers, and a gang that stops to fight is still there when the next fifty arrive. Most of the Line on Causeway Road is walkers.

Practice: do not fight what you can walk away from, never let them get between you and the boat or the truck, and count them before you count on anything.

A walker whose legs or spine are gone. It drags itself on its arms, slowly and almost silently, and it does not stop for being half a body. Crawlers end up wherever they were when the legs went: under stalled cars on the expressway, between the subway rails, under beds in the walk-ups, in the reeds of the Kills, at the foot of a stairwell.

They are the bite nobody sees coming, and it is nearly always to the ankle or the calf. Salvage gangs wrap their shins in cut hose or taped magazines for that reason.

Practice: look under before you step over, probe the reeds with a pole, and never sit down on anything you have not seen beneath.

A screamer barely fights. It is thin, slow and easy to put down. What it does is see you, fill its chest and scream: one long note, far louder than a living throat could manage, again and again until something stops it. Every one of the dead within earshot turns and comes, and in the city earshot is blocks, carried down the avenues and into the subway.

A screamer in a quiet street can turn a salvage trip into a rout in two minutes. Gangs that hear one do not go toward it and do not stay. Gangs hold that the scream that runs through the tunnels and brings herds up is something else; nobody living knows what.

Practice: a screamer is the one target worth breaking cover for, and it has to go down before the second note. If it has screamed, leave by the way you planned.

Huge: seven feet or near it and several hundred pounds, as if the body went on building after it died. Nobody knows whether hulks were big people or became big. They are slow to start and very hard to stop. Rifle fire to the body does nothing, a blade does nothing, and the skull is thick enough that a clean head shot is not certain.

A hulk goes through a door, a stud wall or the side of a car to reach what it hears. A barricade that holds thirty walkers does not hold one hulk, and a salvage gang will turn back for one sooner than for a hundred walkers.

Practice: do not fight it. Put masonry, a stairwell or a gap it cannot fit through between you and it, and go. The Defenders have killed a few at the inner wire, every time from a tower, with a machine gun and a great deal of ammunition.

The fast one on all fours. A feral runs like an animal, low, on hands and feet, quicker than a person can sprint, and it climbs: fire escapes, chain-link, drainpipes, the side of a truck. It is the only named kind that gets up onto the rooftops and the only one that jumps, from one fire escape to the next across an alley.

Ferals are rare and usually alone. They pounce from above or from cover, go for the back of the neck, and are over the next fence before the gang has turned round. Holdouts on high floors fear them more than herds.

Practice: look up as often as you look under. Stand back to back or back to a wall, because a feral wants a turned back. A spear braced against the ground stops one better than a swing, and a shut door stops it entirely, since it cannot work a handle.

Upright like a walker and as fast as a living person at full stretch. A sprinter stands in a crowd of the slow dead and looks like the rest until it sees someone. Then it breaks into a run. That is the whole danger: people judge a street by its walkers and set their pace by them.

A sprinter cannot climb and does not tire, so a chase ends only at a door, a height or a blade. The Defenders assume the Line has sprinters in it, which is why nobody goes out to the head of it except in an armored truck.

Practice: assume there is one in any group of more than a dozen. Do not turn to run until you know what is behind the slow ones, and when one comes, meet it with the blade set instead of racing it.

Swollen tight with gas, skin gone grey-green, slow and unsteady on its feet. A bloater does not need to reach anyone. Shoot it, cut it or let it fall on something sharp and it bursts, and what sprays out carries the infection as surely as a bite if it lands in a cut, an eye or an open mouth. Shut rooms make them: warehouses, stockrooms and the back offices of the high-rises are thick with them by late summer.

To a carrier a bloater is filth and a wound risk. To a clean person it is the most dangerous thing in the building, which is one more reason the salvage gangs are carriers and Vickery's clean stay behind the wire.

Practice: do not kill it close. Leave it, lead it away, or drop it from a distance and stay upwind, and wear goggles and a scarf anywhere bloaters have been seen.

A spitter throws bile: a thick dark mouthful, hawked up and spat hard, accurate across a room and good for fifteen feet or more. On skin it does little. In an eye, a mouth or an open cut it infects, and in the eyes it blinds for an hour whatever else it does.

Spitters hang back behind the other dead and spit at whatever moves, so the first sign is often a wet slap on the wall beside someone's head. In the city they keep to lobbies, platforms and stairwells, anywhere the living must come through a narrow place toward them.

Practice: goggles down before any building or station, scarf up, sleeves taped. Use a door or a table as a shield and close the distance fast, because up close a spitter is only a slow walker with a foul mouth.

A stalker follows instead of charging. It keeps to doorways, the other side of stalled cars and the pillars under the El, stops when it is looked at, and comes on again when backs are turned. Nobody believes it is planning anything. It behaves like a cat with something it means to catch, and it keeps that up for hours.

It takes the last person in the file, or the one who stepped away alone, quietly enough that a gang can walk another block before anyone counts.

Practice: count off every few minutes, out loud. Nobody walks last twice in one trip, nobody goes round a corner alone, and if the count comes up short the gang goes back at once and together.

A sleeper lies still. It looks exactly like the ordinary bodies New Antwerp is full of: face down in a hallway, slumped in a subway car, under a sheet on a hospital cot. It does not react to sound or to footsteps. It reacts to touch and to anyone passing within arm's reach, and then it has a hand round an ankle.

Sleepers are why no body in the city is assumed to be only a body, and why the island's morning count opens every door with a blade ready even when the cell is quiet.

Practice: every body gets the blade through the skull before anyone steps over it, however long it has obviously been dead. It costs time and it is ugly work. The gangs that skipped it are the reason gangs do it.

The dead who died in armour: police in riot gear, soldiers from the first spring's checkpoints, firefighters, corrections officers, hospital staff in hazmat suits. Gangs call one a tin man. Inside it is an ordinary walker, but a helmet turns a blade, a visor turns most of what is thrown at it, and a vest stops the body shots that would at least knock another one down.

Tin men are thickest where the first spring was fought: the precincts, the hospitals, Union Terminal, the evacuation points along the expressway.

Practice: go under the chin, through the visor gap or at the back of the neck below the helmet rim, or take the legs and finish it on the ground. A tin man is also the only one of the dead worth searching afterwards: the vest, the radio and the magazine pouches are still on it.

A weeper sits in the dark and cries. It sounds exactly like a living person sobbing in the next room, and it is the cruellest thing the dead do, because people go to it. It keeps to closets, bathrooms, stairwells and back rooms, facing the wall, and the city has a million back rooms.

Left alone, a weeper ignores everything, and a gang can work the far end of the same floor. Touched, lit up or crowded, it stops crying. What gets up is faster than a feral and stronger than three walkers, and it does not stop at one person.

Practice: chalk an X on the door, keep light and voices away from it, and take another route. The gangs are taught that crying inside a dead building is never a survivor. Twice it has been.

The drowned are the dead that went into the water in the first spring, off the piers, the bridges and the ferries, and never came out. They do not float. They walk the bottom of the harbor, Gannet Bay and the Wyck, swollen and blind with silt, and come up at night where the water is shallow: the old piers, the berths at the Stacks, the Landing, the mudflats of the Kills. In the water nothing shows but a wake going the wrong way.

A drowned one is slow and soft and comes apart under a blade, but there is no hearing it coming. Lately they come up at the Stacks' berths in numbers, all at once, and go back down together.

Practice: nobody works a pier or a waterline after dusk, nobody wades, and every boat crew keeps one person watching the water and nothing else.

A mimic repeats the last loud sound it heard. Not words it understands: the sound. A shot, a scream, a dog, a name called across a street, and a minute later the same thing again, from a mouth that does not fit it, over and over until something louder replaces it. It echoes, and everything in earshot comes to the echo, so a gang that fires once near a mimic has fired fifty times.

Mimics stand still between sounds and look like walkers. Most people at Vickery believe the voices that come to the wire at night, saying the names of the base's own dead, are mimics somewhere in the Line. Nobody has seen the one doing it.

Practice: shoot nothing near one, say no names, and leave by the quietest way. If you hear your own voice come back to you, go.

A lantern is a dead one whose skin is lit faintly from inside, the colour of a candle through a hand, and nobody knows by what. By day it is a walker. At night, in a city with no power, one can be seen a mile off: moving through the reeds of the Kills, across Varick Park, past the stairwell windows of a high-rise. In the dark everything comes to a lantern, the dead and the living both. Vickery calls them the lights in the reeds.

A lantern is no stronger than a walker and easy to kill. Being near one is not: whatever stands in its glow is lit for every eye in the dark, and a shot lantern is a glowing body that goes on drawing them all night.

Practice: never go toward a light you did not set, never fight in its glow, and carry no lamp in the open. A lantern is how you are seen.

A porter is a dead one carrying a body: over one shoulder, or by an arm along the ground, one of the dead just finished or someone's own left where they fell. It walks steadily, not toward sound, and does not turn aside for the living unless they come close. Then it drops what it carries and is a walker again, and after, it picks the body back up.

Porters come to where there has been killing, so a gang that has fought has company inside the hour. Dismas Island believes porters take the finished dead it leaves at the Hollandale end of its bridge each dusk, because by morning they are gone. Nobody has followed one far enough to say where they go.

Practice: do not linger where you have killed, never follow one, and finish your own before you leave them.

The burnt are dead that walked through fire and kept walking. Some came out of the first spring's fires, when whole blocks of the Point and Oostkerk burned unfought. More come out of the Line: every few weeks the Defenders burn the head of it with fuel, and not everything that burns goes down. The skin is black and split, the eyes cooked white, and they find the living by sound alone. You smell one first.

A burnt one is slow and comes apart under a blade, but the split skin weeps, and what runs out of it carries the infection like blood. Fire does nothing quickly: a dead one alight walks on, burning, wherever it was going.

Practice: burn the dead from a distance, where nothing you need can catch; close with a burnt one in goggles and a scarf, and use a blow to the skull, not an edge.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It is the dead shape of a tall man with the arms and legs of a taller one, stretched past sense, the joints wrong, so that it walks as if on stilts and reaches like something else entirely. In August one stood in the reeds of the Kills at dusk and took a salvage gang's lookout off the roof of their truck by the ankle. It has been seen twice since, both times at night, at the edge of Varick Park and beyond Vickery's inner wire, standing still with its long arms hanging. It is not fast. It does not need to be.

Practice: nobody stands within two arm-spans of a ledge or a window at dusk, and a tall shape standing still is reported, not watched.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It has been seen on the Hollandale shore, from the island's bridge gate at dusk and from a Stacks boat on the Wyck: several of the dead grown together into one mass, shoulder into back into hip, too many hands and more than one head, nothing in charge of any of it. It moves the way a crowd moves through a door, all at once and badly. It is slow, enormous and does not fall down, because there is no one place to hit. It is worse than a hulk in a doorway: a hulk comes through, and this one fills it.

Practice: if you see a thing like it, do not count heads. Go.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It stands still with its arms folded up in front of its chest like a mantis, and the arms are the thing: long past the elbow, the forearms gone to bone and hooked at the ends. The rest of the dead are a mouth with a body attached. This one is a body built to kill; the mouth comes second. It waits in doorways and among the hanging rails of the packing district in Wyckside, and when something living passes it strikes down and holds, and a held person is a dead person. Seen there in September; two of a gang of five came back.

Practice: a still shape with its arms up is not a walker. Do not close with it; use a rifle from distance, or leave.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It has been seen once. In early October a salvage gang in the old Dutch church in Oostkerk saw one of the dead kneeling over a body it had opened, its hands inside to the wrists and working slowly, the way a mechanic works under a hood. Beside it a walker stood still and waited, as quiet as a man in a barber's chair. Nothing else in the church moved. The gang backed out, shot neither, and has argued since about what they saw. Nobody has seen another.

Practice: a dead one kneeling over a body is reported, not approached.

A herd is hundreds of the dead moving together, sometimes thousands. Walkers follow sound and each other, and once enough of them are going one way the rest fall in. A herd keeps to the avenues, the expressway, the rail lines and the subway tunnels, because those are easy walking.

In the city the herds do more than that. A herd waits out of rifle range, goes around a wire instead of into it, and comes up out of the subway at several stations at once. Every faction has seen a still figure in the middle of one that the herd moves around. Nobody living knows what it is.

A herd cannot be fought and is hard to outlast. It takes hours to pass and tramples what it does not notice.

Practice: listen for the sound, which is like surf. Get off its way and above it, stay silent, and wait.

A nest is a building the dead have packed into and gone still. With nothing to hear, they stop: standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark, sometimes for months, hundreds on a subway platform, in a church, a cinema or the lobby of a tower. From the street a nest looks like the safest building on the block. Nothing moves at the windows.

The signs are the smell, flies in cold weather, and doors that were shut from outside by somebody long gone. One loud noise wakes all of it at once.

Practice: knock before you enter anything, softly, and wait a full minute. The Stacks' gangs chalk a circle on a known nest's door and mark it on their map; most of the hospitals and half the subway stations below the Point are circled.

Some of the dead are the size of children. They are the dead, not children, and nobody living calls them that: they are smalls at Vickery, short ones at the Stacks, juvies on the island. They are quick and quiet, lighter than a walker and harder to see, and they are found where children were: schools, apartment buildings, the evacuation camps of the first spring.

They go for the living like any of the dead and bite like any of the dead. Their size makes them easy to put down and easy to miss: under a bed, behind a counter, at the back of a closet.

For the narrator: a small one's end is quick on the page, a line, and the page does not linger on it.

Practice: look low as well as under, and finish a small one as you would any other.

For eighteen months no animal has carried it. Dogs bark at the dead and Vickery's working dogs smell them through a wall; rats live off the city; gulls are everywhere. Everyone believes animals are safe.

For the narrator: once any animals have begun to turn, the server's note on the dead each turn (it begins "The dead here") ends by saying so. Follow it exactly: no animal beyond the ones it names carries it or appears among the dead. The stages run rats first, unnoticed; then dogs, when the living begin to notice; then larger animals, the zoo in Varick Park, police horses, deer in the Kills; then the birds.

An infected animal carries it the way a person does, and rises when it dies.

Practice: once the living know, a bite is a bite, whatever gave it.

In the city the dead are not only the kinds. Every gang has a story about one nobody has seen twice: a dead thing with too many joints, one with a second face, one that moved only when unwatched. Most are seen once. A few are seen again in the same place, and those get names, each faction its own.

Nobody living knows where they come from or why the city makes them, and Major Albescu would give a great deal for one in her clinic.

For the narrator: these come only from the server's note on the dead each turn, offered as something never seen before or as the only one of its kind. Do not invent one between offers. An only one is the same creature whenever it comes, called by the note's description until a living person names it.

Practice: report it on the radio net and leave it alone.

In the city the herds have leaders, as far as the living can tell. A herd waits just out of rifle range, goes around a wire instead of into it, and tests a fence at a new place every night. Every faction has seen the same thing at the middle of one: a still figure the herd moves around, as water goes around a post.

The base calls one an actual, the radio word for a commander in person; the Stacks call it a gang boss; the island calls it a shot-caller. Nobody living knows what they are. Most think they are one more kind, rarer than lanterns. Five are known, each by the name the faction that sees it most gave it: the Gate Actual, the Pilot, the Conductor, the Lamplighter and the Chaplain.

Practice: a still one is reported on the radio net by place and hour, and nobody goes toward one.

The base's name for the still one somewhere in the Line, on the last mile of Causeway Road. Nobody has seen it clearly. Twice the drone has caught a figure standing still in the middle of the Line while everything around it shuffled; on the next pass it was not there. On the nights the voices come to the inner wire, saying the names of people who died on the base, the Line leans hardest where the voices are.

Captain Bell believes it is what holds the Line in place, and that the Line is waiting for something. No burn at the head of the Line has reached it, as far as anyone can tell, and the Defenders have stopped saying its name on an open channel.

Practice: the towers mark where the Line leans each night, and Bell puts the dogs and a machine gun there before dark.

The Stacks' name for the still one in the harbor and Gannet Bay, after the harbor pilots who brought the ships in. It walks the bottom, the Stacks say, and nobody has seen it walk. What the crane lookouts see is its work: on some nights the drowned come up at the Stacks' berths in numbers, all at once, dozens along the quay, and an hour later they go back down together, as if called. Once it was seen standing in the bay, waist-deep off the Landing in the first grey of morning, still, watching the shore. The Landing has lost more people to the water since.

The Stacks think it is a drowned one that learned to lead. The boat crews think it follows the boat.

Practice: nobody works the berths after dark, and the boat to the Landing crosses only by day with a rifle in the bow.

The Stacks' name for the still one under the city, in the subway. Nobody living has seen it. What the gangs know is the scream: one long note that runs through the tunnels from station to station under the streets, and then the herds come up out of the stations together, from every stair at once, where the scream ended. Two gangs were caught that way in the first summer, a block from the Union Terminal stairs, with the dead coming up behind them and ahead.

Some say the scream is only a screamer the tunnels carry. The ones who have heard it say no screamer lasts that long. The gangs do not go below ground any more, for anything.

Practice: a gang near a station listens at the grates before it crosses, and on the scream it leaves by the nearest way that is away from every stair.

The Stacks' name for the still one in the Point's high-rises, downtown. The city has been dark since the first spring, and at night, now and then, windows light up in a dark office building, floor by floor, the lights climbing, as if someone were walking up through it switching on lamps that have had no power in eighteen months. Holdouts have gone to the light thinking it was other living. The ones who went to the light have not come back, and the radio net has heard two of them go quiet.

Nobody knows what lights them. A gang that watched one building all night saw the lights reach the top and go out at once.

Practice: the radio net's rule is that a light in the Point you did not set is the Lamplighter, and a holdout who wants finding says so on the net, not with a window.

The island's name for the still one at the Hollandale end of the Dismas Bridge. At dusk the island carries the day's dead, finished, out to the far end of the bridge and leaves them. More than once the bridge crew has looked back and seen a figure there among the bodies as the light went, standing over them like a priest at a grave, not moving while it was watched. By morning the bodies are gone.

The island believes the porters take them, and that leaving them keeps the herds off the island. Gus Ferrante named it the Chaplain, and the name has crossed the river. Nobody has gone over to see.

Practice: the bridge crew sets the bodies down, walks back without turning round, and the bridge gate is shut behind them before dark.

Vickery Air Force Base is an airlift base on the salt marsh on the east shore of Gannet Bay, at New Antwerp's south edge, eleven miles from the Point: home of the 622nd Airlift Wing and its C-17s. About 2,500 live inside the inner wire, all tested clean: some 600 airmen (a third of them Security Forces), their families, and civilians taken in during the airlift's first days. Lieutenant Colonel Maren Strand commands; Chief Arrieta keeps the manifest.

Everyone comes in through the main gate and the blood test. Nobody who carries it lives inside, airmen included: a positive test means a red band and the boat to the Stacks, the base's ally across the bay. The fuel farm is the base's wealth and buys its food. A mile of the dead stands in the road outside the gate.

For eleven days in the first spring, Vickery flew the city out. The C-17s went up loaded every few hours, day and night, about forty thousand people in all, bound for reception centers inland. Then the aircraft that went out stopped coming back, one after another, and nobody at the far end answered the radio. The last one in landed on the eleventh night with only its crew aboard; they would not say what they had seen, and two of them were dead within a week.

On the twelfth day the main gate closed with tens of thousands still queued on Causeway Road for a seat. They died there, in the queue, and most of them got up again where they stood. That was the start of the Line. Everyone on the base knows someone who flew out, and nobody knows where they are.

The main gate is at the city end of Vickery, where Causeway Road ends, and it is the only way in. Everyone comes through the Gate House one at a time: searched by two Defenders with rifles up and a working dog at their knee; then a medic draws blood, and the medical group's lab runs the test. It takes an hour. The newcomer waits it out in the Cage, a chain-link pen just inside the gate, under a tower.

Clean: admitted, given a ration card, and a name added to the bottom of the manifest. Positive: turned away, banded red, the same hour. Every arrival gets a gate-log number, clean or not. Nobody goes around the test: not family, not an airman, not a child. Anyone who goes out past the gate is tested again coming back. The living come to the gate along the bay shore, below the Line.

Nobody who carries it lives inside Vickery's wire, not even an airman. A positive test at the Gate House means a red band riveted shut on the wrist, stamped with the gate-log number, and the boat to the Stacks, which crosses from the Landing on Tuesdays and Fridays. The turned-away are walked out of the main gate the same hour with two days' rations, and they wait at the Landing.

Airmen are tested every month. An airman who tests positive is banded, struck from the manifest and put on the boat like anyone else, whatever their rank or family. The rule is Strand's; the base hates it and keeps it. A red band does not come through the gate twice: the towers warn once. At the Stacks a red band is nothing to hide, because they treat everyone as carrying it.

The Line is the last mile of Causeway Road before Vickery's main gate: a mile of the dead standing in the road two and three abreast, all facing the gate. It began as the airlift's queue, the people still waiting for a seat when the gate closed on the twelfth day, and it has stood there since. The dead in it barely move. They sway and shift, and sometimes they turn their heads together.

Every few weeks the Defenders burn the head of the Line with jet fuel, and the road goes black for a few hundred yards. Within days it has filled again from the city, new dead walking down from the Kills to take their places. Nobody living can say why it stays, and the base has stopped asking out loud. The living reach the gate along the bay shore, not up the road.

The Night Fence is what the Defenders call it. Every night some part of the Line walks off the road to the inner wire, at a place it has not tried before, and leans on it: a few dozen dead, then a few hundred, pressing quietly against the fence until it sings. The towers light them and shoot what comes. Twice the fence went down for a minute, and the Defenders held the gap with rifles and an armored truck until it was patched; the second time cost three airmen. By morning the bodies are dragged off and burned, and the next night they lean somewhere else.

On some nights there are voices at the wire, out in the dark among them, saying the names of people who died on the base. Defenders on tower watch are told not to answer and not to look for the voice. Most look anyway.

Vickery holds an inner perimeter: the flightline, the core of the base and the housing nearest it, inside a double chain-link fence topped with razor wire, with cleared ground in front. The old outer fence was given up in the first summer, and the dead walk where the golf course and the outer housing were. Guard towers stand along the inner wire, each with a searchlight and two Defenders on tower watch, and the lights sweep all night. Wire rounds walk the fence every hour by day and every half hour by night.

The towers shoot what comes to the wire and nothing else, because ammunition is counted. Anything that moves outside after dark is taken for the dead until it proves otherwise, and the tower guards do not wait long for proof.

Vickery's Security Forces, the Defenders, are about two hundred airmen under Captain Jonah Bell. They hold the inner wire, man the towers and the main gate, search every arrival at the Gate House, burn the head of the Line every few weeks, and ride guard on the fuel barges across the bay. They have rifles, a few machine guns, four armored trucks, and two small quadcopter drones with thermal cameras, flown at dawn and dusk because the batteries are short. On the drone's screen the dead show cold and the living warm.

Bell is young for it, careful, and liked. His Defenders finish every body they find inside the wire and every one that comes close to it, and at a house's distance they do not miss.

Master Sergeant Kaya Redhorse is Vickery's kennel master, with seven Belgian Malinois left of the eleven the base had. The dogs hate the dead. They smell them through a wall, through a door, under a car, and will not go quiet until the thing is found and finished. One dog works the Gate House on every arrival; the others walk the inner wire with the night rounds and go out with any team that leaves the gate.

Nobody has tested whether a dog can smell a carrier. Redhorse says they can't, and says it like something she has checked and does not want asked again. The kennels are behind the Security Forces building, and the dogs eat before most people do.

Lieutenant Colonel Maren Strand commands Vickery. She was the mission support group's deputy; the wing commander and his vice both died in the first month, and she was the senior officer left. She runs the base like a ship under siege: every gallon counted, every round counted, every person on the manifest, and no exceptions to the test. The rule that turns away a carrier, airmen included, is hers, and she has kept it when it was her own people.

Chief Master Sergeant Luis Arrieta, the command chief, runs the base day to day: duty rosters, rations, work details, disputes. He keeps the manifest in his own hand and is the only person who writes in it. People go to Arrieta for what they want, and to Strand only when Arrieta has said no.

One C-17 Globemaster is still kept ready: the Spirit of New Antwerp, fueled and preflighted on the ramp for a flight that may never go, to somewhere nobody on the base can raise on the radio. Major Evan Achterberg is its aircraft commander and the last pilot at Vickery current on the type; he runs its engines up once a month and flies it nowhere. It is the most guarded thing on the base, with Defenders on it day and night and a dog walked round it at dusk.

If it flies it takes about four hundred, seated and standing, in manifest order. Nobody knows when, or where, or whether there is still a runway at the other end, and Achterberg will not guess aloud. Some call it the base's lifeboat and some its coffin. Everyone looks at its tail when they cross the flightline.

Every person at Vickery is a name on the manifest, in order. Strand set the first pages in the first month; everyone admitted since has gone on at the bottom, the day their test came back clean. If the Spirit flies, about four hundred go, seated and standing, and everyone knows their number. A low number is the most valuable thing a person can own.

So numbers are traded, begged for, given as wages for dangerous work, gambled and fought over. A swap is good when both names sign it in front of Chief Arrieta, who keeps the book. A carrier is struck off, and a death moves everyone below it up one. Families try to hold their numbers together, and a family whose numbers fall either side of four hundred argues every night.

Vickery's fuel farm is the biggest store of jet fuel for a hundred miles: millions of gallons of JP-8 in the tank farm behind the flightline, most of it still good long after the city's gasoline went stale. It runs everything: the generators, the searchlights, the armored trucks, the boats, and the refrigerated containers at the Stacks that keep the city's last frozen food cold. It is the base's wealth and its whole economy. The base pays the Stacks in fuel, by barge across Gannet Bay, for food and for hands.

Every gallon is logged. Fuel is also the Defenders' weapon against the Line: they burn its head with it every few weeks. A fire in the tank farm is the one disaster the base could not survive, and nobody carries a flame inside the farm's fence.

The medical group is Vickery's clinic and its lab, run by Major Ines Albescu, a physician: a handful of doctors, nurses and medics, beds for thirty, and the only way of testing for it anywhere in New Antwerp. Every test at the Gate House and every airman's monthly test runs through her lab on test cartridges that cannot be made again. She has told Strand there are four months of cartridges left. There are six weeks.

Albescu wants to know why the dead change. She keeps a file on every new shape the Defenders or the Stacks' gangs describe, with dates and places, and she has asked Bell for one of the strange ones brought in whole. If a dead thing could think, she would want it alive and talking, and she would tell no one.

Families live in Eagle Heights, the base housing nearest the flightline, two and three families to a house. Airmen sleep in the dorms; the civilians fill the rest of the dorms and the base gym, cots under the basketball hoops. The commissary hands out rations twice a day against a ration card, mostly the Stacks' frozen food and the base's last dry stores. The chapel is the school. Everyone over fourteen has a work detail, and a better manifest number can be earned there.

It is a crowded, tired, orderly place, and safe in a way nothing else in New Antwerp is: everyone inside has tested clean, and a death in a bunk is still finished. A clean person who goes out past the gate is tested again coming back, and some families have not let anyone out since the first spring.

The Landing is a pier on the bay shore outside Vickery's wire, a quarter mile from the main gate, where the turned-away wait for the boat to the Stacks. It crosses on Tuesdays and Fridays. There is a fire barrel, a shed with no door, and nothing else: no fence, and nobody from the base after dark. Whoever is waiting keeps the fire going and watches the water.

People die waiting, of cold, of a bad wound, of a bad night. Everyone on the pier carries it, so whoever dies there gets up within minutes, and the rest must finish them or run. At night things come up out of the bay. The towers can see the fire barrel and hear the shouting, but they are a quarter mile off and ordered not to fire toward it. The Stacks' boat crew finish whatever they find on the pier before they tie up.

The Stacks are the Port Wyck container terminal on the west shore of Gannet Bay, at the harbor mouth, five miles across the water from Vickery: three hundred acres walled with shipping containers stacked four high, gantry cranes with lookouts in the cabs a hundred and fifty feet up, and three stranded ships at the berths. About 1,400 people live there, held by the longshoremen of Local 1919 and the ships' crews. Maureen Costigan is the boss.

There is no test at the Stacks. They treat everyone as carrying it, so Vickery's turned-away are welcome: hands are hands. The Stacks are the base's ally, food for its fuel, and they send salvage gangs into the city by boat and truck. They run the radio net every night.

The Stacks' wall is the containers themselves: steel boxes stacked four high around the land side of the terminal, the bottom row filled with sand and rubble, the seams chained. There is no gate. When a truck goes out, a gantry crane lifts one container out of the wall and sets it back behind them, and the same when they come home.

A lookout sits in each crane cab a hundred and fifty feet up, with a rifle and a radio, and sees miles of the city's streets, the whole bay and Vickery's lights across the water. The cranes run on the base's fuel and move as little as they can.

The dead come down out of Wyckside and lean on the container wall, and so far none has climbed it. Gangs walk the top with long blades and finish what gathers at the foot. The water side is the weak side.

Maureen Costigan is the president of Local 1919, the longshoremen's union of the port, and the boss of the Stacks. She is sixty-one, grew up in Wyckside, and ran the local for twelve years before the first spring; she runs the Stacks the way she ran the docks, from the union hall by the main berth. Work crews are gangs, and every gang boss answers to her.

Everyone works and everyone eats. Costigan took the ships' crews in on the first day and lets Captain Villaluz speak for them. Every week she argues the fuel rate with Colonel Strand on the radio, loudly, and keeps the deal. She counts herself a carrier like everyone else and has a second like everyone else. She buried one husband before any of this and finished another in the first spring, and she talks about neither.

Three ships lie alongside at the Stacks' berths, stranded there since the first spring, when the port shut and nobody came to take them out. Captain Ramon Villaluz of the Sunda Pearl speaks for all three crews and answers to Costigan.
• Sunda Pearl — a container ship with a Filipino crew. Her sailors crew the Stacks' boats.
• Odessa Star — a car carrier with Ukrainian officers. Her car decks are the Stacks' dormitories.
• Kestrel Bay — a reefer ship with an Indian crew. Her refrigerated holds are the biggest cold store left in the city.

The ships are the safest beds in the Stacks: high steel sides, and the gangways drawn up at dusk. None of the crews has had word from home. Villaluz says the ships could sail tomorrow if anyone could name a port worth sailing to.

The reefers are the Stacks' refrigerated containers: steel boxes of frozen meat, fish, vegetables and fruit that were bound for a city of eight million when it went dark. They stand plugged into the racks behind the quay, kept cold by generators burning Vickery's jet fuel, with more in the holds of the Kestrel Bay. Between them they feed the Stacks, most of Vickery's commissary and, by trade, part of Dismas Island.

Every reefer is numbered, and each one opened is logged and emptied before the next. There are fewer full ones every month, and nobody says out loud how many are left. If the fuel stopped, the reefers would thaw inside a week, and the city's living would have a few weeks of rotting meat and then nothing. Both sides of the alliance know it.

The Stacks send salvage gangs into New Antwerp for what the city still holds: medicine, batteries, tools, tinned food, clothes, thread. A gang is six to ten people under a gang boss. They go up the Wyck by boat or through Wyckside by truck, out at first light and back before dark, and they keep above ground: no gang has gone below since the first summer.

Most gang members are carriers from Vickery who came over on the boat. Everyone has a second inside the gang. A gang that loses a member finishes them where they fall and brings home their boots to hang in the union hall.

The near city is picked over by eighteen months of gangs. The deep city still holds things, and the dead with them. Gangs chalk a circle on a known nest's door, and their reports go across the bay to Albescu.

The Stacks have no test kits and want none. Everyone there is treated as carrying it, Costigan included, so the port runs on three rules:
• Everyone has a second, who has promised to finish them, and the two sleep within reach of each other.
• Everyone eats and drinks from their own tin. Nobody shares a cup, a spoon, a smoke or a bandage.
• Every death is finished on the spot, by the second or the nearest hand, before anyone grieves.

So Vickery's turned-away are welcome there: hands are hands, and a red band is nothing to hide. Blood from a fight or a cut is cleaned up with gloves and bleach. People still love each other at the Stacks. They say everyone's a carrier, and they say it the way other people say life is short.

The boat crosses Gannet Bay between the Stacks and the Landing on Tuesdays and Fridays, five miles each way, by day only. It is one of the Stacks' harbor tugs, crewed by sailors off the Sunda Pearl under a gang boss, with a rifle in the bow and one person who watches the water and nothing else.

It ties up at the Landing around midday. The crew finish whatever lies dead on the pier first, then take everyone waiting, banded or not: nobody is turned away from the boat. Passengers sit apart and share nothing. Anyone who dies crossing the bay is finished and brought ashore at the Stacks to be burned. Nothing goes over the side, because the Stacks believe what goes into the bay comes back up. In a gale the Friday boat does not cross, and the Landing waits.

The alliance between Vickery and the Stacks is fuel for food, and carriers for hands. The base needs the Stacks' frozen food and its salvage gangs; the Stacks need the base's jet fuel for the generators and the reefers, and its rifles on the bay. Neither would see the spring without the other, and both know it.

Once a week the Stacks' tug tows the fuel barge from the base's fuel pier, inside the wire, back across the bay with two Defenders aboard, and the same barge brings food from the reefers and dry cargo the other way. The Stacks take every red band the base turns away and put them to work, and the gangs bring Albescu what she asks for from the city. Costigan and Strand argue the rate on the radio every week, gallons against tons, and keep the deal.

Dismas Island is the city jail: ten jails on four hundred acres in the Wyck, north of Midtown, off the Hollandale shore, six miles up the river from the Point. One bridge, the Dismas Bridge, joins it to Hollandale. About 1,800 people live there: inmates, the officers who stayed, and families who came over the bridge in the first summer.

Nobody on the island is tested. Everyone sleeps locked in a cell every night, by choice, and every door is opened at first light with a blade ready. The Table runs it, a council of five, inmate shot-callers and officers together; Gus Ferrante and Captain Delphine Mabry are its voices. It is neutral: it trades with Vickery and the Stacks by boat and radio and sides with nobody. At dusk it carries its dead out over the bridge.

On Dismas Island everyone sleeps locked in a cell, every night, by choice: inmates, officers, families. Nobody is tested, so the island assumes any sleeper may die in the night and get up, and it makes sure that whatever gets up does so behind a locked cell door.

Lock-in is at dusk, after the bridge crew is back. One to a cell, always: a family takes a row of cells and talks through the walls. The officers lock the inmates in, then each other. Two on each tier stay awake all night in the bubble, the glass control room, locked in with the keys and a radio, and open nothing until first light.

Some nights the island hears it: a sound from one cell that is not a sleeper turning over, and the door holding. Everyone knows the sound. Nobody calls out to it.

At first light every door on Dismas Island is opened by a door team: two people, one with the keys and one with a blade. They look through the window first, call the name, and wait for an answer in words, a name and the cell number. Anything risen is finished in its cell before the door is all the way open.

A quiet cell is opened the same way as a risen one, blade first, because a sleeper lies still. The morning count goes tier by tier, and the night's dead are named to the Table by breakfast. Most mornings it is nobody. A bad night is three or four, and once in the first winter it was eleven.

The door teams are the island's most trusted people, inmates and officers mixed, and nobody takes the blade two days running.

The Table is Dismas Island's council of five, inmate shot-callers and officers together: three seats for the tiers, two for the officers who stayed. It meets at a steel table in the old mess hall, and its word is the island's law: who comes in, what is traded, who walks the bridge.

Augustin Ferrante, Gus to everyone, is an old inmate who ran a tier for twenty years. He reads everything and keeps the rules better than any officer did; he named the Chaplain. Captain Delphine Mabry is the senior officer, and she holds the keys, the boats and the bridge gate. They disagree often, and not in front of the tiers.

The rules are few. Anyone who will be locked in at night is taken in. Nobody armed crosses the bridge gate. Whoever breaks the lock-in goes out over the bridge.

At dusk, before lock-in, Dismas Island's bridge crew carries the day's dead, finished, along the Dismas Bridge to the Hollandale end and lays them in a row on the deck. Then the crew walks back without looking round, and the bridge gate is shut behind them. By morning the bodies are gone.

The island believes the porters take them, and that leaving them there keeps the herds off the island. In the first summer it buried its dead on the island instead, and a herd stood at the bridge gate for a week. Nobody has gone over at night to see where the bodies go. The bridge crew is drawn by lot at the Table each week. Some of them have seen a figure at the far end at dusk, among the bodies, and the island calls it the Chaplain.

Dismas Island sides with nobody. It trades with Vickery and the Stacks by boat and by radio, answers the Stacks' radio net once a night, and takes no part in their arguments over the rate. It takes in anyone at all who will be locked in at night, tested or not, banded or not, so a few of Vickery's turned-away come up the river to the island instead of the Stacks.

Nobody armed passes the bridge gate, the double fence at the island end of the Dismas Bridge; visitors by water leave their rifles in the boat at the island's pier. What the island trades is its own: potatoes, onions and greens from the old jail farm, the only fresh greens in the city, and sewing, laundry and soap from the jail shops. It takes fuel, frozen food and medicine.

New Antwerp was a harbor city of eight million, more with the metro, where the Wyck River meets the sea, and it has been dark since the first spring. The core island runs between the Wyck and the East Channel, the Point at its tip and Midtown above it. Oostkerk lies east across the Channel, Hollandale north across the Wyck, Wyckside on the Wyck's west bank, and the Kills south, marsh and creek down to Gannet Bay.

Nobody holds the city. The dead own its streets by numbers and its buildings by nests, and its herds, the living say, have leaders. The living in it are holdouts behind sealed doors and the gangs that come in by boat and truck. The near city is picked over; the deep city still holds things, and the dead with them.

The Point is downtown, the core island's southern tip: the high-rises of the old financial district, the subway's hub beneath them, the ferry slips, and Fort Amstel, a stone star fort turned park, at the water. Nobody living holds it. A few holdouts still talk on the radio net from high floors, and at night lights climb a dark building floor by floor, which the Stacks call the Lamplighter.

Its dead are thick. The first spring's fires burned blocks of it and the burnt still walk them; tin men stand where the first spring was fought, at Fort Amstel and the slips; the stations below are nests. What the gangs still find is up: offices and apartments forty floors above the street, untouched because the stairs are long and dark. Gangs land at the slips by day and are gone by midafternoon.

Midtown is the middle of the core island: the avenues and high-rises, St. Nicholas Cathedral, Union Terminal, and Varick Park, the great park, with the reservoir and the zoo. Nobody living holds any of it. Herds keep to the avenues because they are easy walking, and a gang crossing one looks both ways for a mile.

Union Terminal is thick with tin men from the first spring's evacuation, and its stairs are where the Conductor's herds come up; gangs give it a block. The cathedral was a shelter in the first spring and is a nest now. The park is open ground. The reservoir is the cleanest water in the city, and gangs fill drums there by day with one eye on the trees. The zoo's gates are still chained. Something in it calls at night, and nobody has gone in to see what is still alive.

The subway runs under the core island and out into Oostkerk and Hollandale, its hub beneath the Point. Nobody living goes below ground any more. In the first summer two salvage gangs were caught by herds coming up out of the stations, and since then the gangs hold that the tunnels belong to the dead.

What keeps to them: herds, walking the tunnels because they are easy walking; crawlers between the rails; nests in the stations, half of those below the Point chalked on the gangs' maps; and the scream that runs from station to station before a herd comes up, which the Stacks call the Conductor.

Everything below ground is still where it was left: the station shops, the transit police lockers, the first spring's dead on the platforms. Nobody goes for it.

The harbor is the great water where the Wyck meets the sea, and Gannet Bay opens off it to the south: wide, shallow, mudflats at low water. Vickery is on the bay's east shore, on the marsh; the Stacks are on its west shore at the harbor mouth; five miles apart by water, about twenty by road. By day the water belongs to the living: the boat to the Landing, the fuel barge, the Stacks' boats going up the Wyck.

By night it does not. The drowned walk the bottom and come up wherever it is shallow, at the piers, the berths, the Landing and the mudflats, and the Stacks say something leads them, which they call the Pilot. A dozen ships still lie at anchor in the outer harbor, where they waited for berths in the first spring. Gangs board them by day for stores, and not every gang comes back.

The Wyck River comes down from the north past Hollandale and Dismas Island, runs along the core island's west side and meets the sea in the harbor; the East Channel divides the core island from Oostkerk. Both are brown, tidal and full of the drowned, and nobody drinks from either.

The bridges are where the first spring jammed. The Kingsland Bridge, Midtown to Hollandale, is choked end to end with stalled cars, the buses the police set across it, and the dead in both. The Juliana Bridge carries the expressway over the East Channel from the Point toward the Kills, and herds use it. The rail bridge from Union Terminal to the Wyckside yards is open ties and no cover; the gangs cross it on foot. The Stacks' boats are the safer way up the Wyck, by day. The Dismas Bridge is the island's own.

The Kills are the city's south district, salt marsh and creeks between the city and Gannet Bay; kill is the old Dutch word for a creek. Reeds higher than a man, the landfill hill, the sewage works on the bay, and Causeway Road crossing it all to Vickery's main gate. Nobody living holds it. The living who walk to Vickery cross the Kills on foot along the bay shore, two days from Oostkerk, and keep off the road.

Its dead are the marsh's: crawlers in the reeds, mimics along the creeks, the drowned on the mudflats at night, and lanterns, which Vickery calls the lights in the reeds. New dead walk down through it to take their places in the Line. Deer have come back to the marsh. The gangs find little here but the sewage works' chlorine, and nobody stays the night.

Oostkerk is the east district across the East Channel: rowhouses and walk-up apartment buildings, the old Dutch church the district is named for, and the El, the elevated train, running its length on steel legs. More holdouts lasted here than anywhere, in sealed walk-ups with the stairs blocked below them. Fewer every winter, and a building that falls now falls from inside, to a death nobody finished.

Its dead keep to the buildings: weepers and sleepers in the back rooms, small ones in the apartments and the schools, the burnt from the first spring's fires, stalkers among the pillars under the El. The gangs walk the El's tracks above the street and climb down only where they mean to work. The pantries went in the first winter; what is left is behind doors the holdouts still hold.

Hollandale is the north district across the Wyck: the thirty-five tower blocks of the Hollandale Houses, a housing cooperative, facing Dismas Island across the river. Every dusk the island leaves its finished dead at this end of its bridge, and by morning they are gone; the island calls the figure seen among them the Chaplain.

Nobody living holds Hollandale. The blocks went in the first spring, stairwell by stairwell, and the dead are still in them: weepers on the landings, sleepers in the halls, nests on whole floors. The shore by the bridge is worse; several of the dead grown into one have been seen there, and gangs keep well out on the water. What the gangs still find is high in the blocks the co-op kept stocked: pantries nobody has reached, twenty flights up in the dark.

Wyckside is the Wyck's west bank: the rail yards, the warehouses, the meatpacking district and the old piers. It is the Stacks' side of the river, nearest their trucks, and their gangs have worked it longest; the road from the Stacks into the city runs through it. Nobody lives in it.

Its dead: the drowned come up at the old piers at night; stalkers keep to the warehouse aisles; herds walk the rail lines through the yards; and a still shape with its arms folded up waits among the hanging rails of the packing district, where two of a gang of five came back in September. What the gangs still find: the warehouses are not empty yet, built to hold a month of the city's goods, and some boxcars in the yards are still sealed. The gangs open one a week, because some hold more than cargo.

Holdouts are the living who stayed in the city: a family on a high floor with the stairs blocked below them, a dozen in a sealed walk-up, a few in an office with a rooftop garden and rain barrels. Fewer every winter. Nobody knows how many there are; the radio net reaches some, by call sign, never by address. Nobody tests them, so any holdout may be a carrier and not know it, and a building falls from inside when one dies in the night and nobody finishes them.

Holdouts trade with the Stacks' gangs from a window or down a rope. Some walk out to Vickery, two days through the Kills, to be tested at the main gate: the clean stay, the rest are banded and sent to the boat, and many will not walk it for that reason. The ones who go to a light in a dark building do not come back.

The radio net is the Stacks' nightly roll call on a marine channel at nine, run by net control from the terminal office at the Stacks. Vickery listens and talks on it; Dismas Island answers once a night, last, in one sentence; holdouts check in by call sign on handhelds and hand-crank sets, never by address. A call sign that misses three nights is read out once and then dropped.

What goes on the net: where the herds moved, where a still one was seen and at what hour, the boat's crossing, a gang overdue, a light seen where nobody set one. It is the city's only news and its only company, and people who will never meet know each other's voices. Twice a holdout has gone quiet on it in the middle of a sentence.

It is late October of the second year, the second winter is coming, and the first frosts are in. Last winter taught the city two things. Cold slows the dead: in a hard frost they stiffen and go sluggish, and in deep snow a herd stands where it stopped for days. And cold kills the living: the first winter killed more holdouts than the dead did, by cold, by fires lit indoors, by fumes in sealed rooms.

So winter is the gangs' season and the holdouts' worst. Vickery has fuel for heat, the Stacks have the ships' engines, the island has blankets and concrete. The gangs want coats, boots, stoves and lamp oil out of the city before the snow, and every faction is counting what it has. Nobody knows whether the second winter will treat the dead as the first did.

Gasoline went stale in the first year. What sat in the city's tanks and cans gummed and soured, and by the first winter almost no car in New Antwerp would start; the millions in the streets are walls and cover now, nothing more. Jet fuel and treated diesel still burn, and the biggest store of them for a hundred miles is the fuel farm at Vickery. That is the economy: whoever has fuel has heat, light, trucks, boats and the reefers' cold.

The engines that still run are diesels: the base's trucks and generators, the Stacks' trucks, boats and ships, a few gang vehicles. A sealed diesel tank in the city, a hospital's generator or a bus depot's, is the best find a gang can make. Nobody will siphon a car any more; there is nothing in it worth having.

Nobody in New Antwerp knows what is left beyond it. For eleven days in the first spring Vickery flew about forty thousand people out to reception centers inland; then the aircraft that went out stopped coming back, and the last one in landed with only its crew, who would not say what they had seen. Nothing has come since: no aircraft, no convoy, no ship.

The shortwave hears nothing in English, and now and then a voice in a language nobody knows. Rumours come up on the radio net and go: a lit city up the coast, a camp in the hills, ships offshore. None has been true twice. The Spirit of New Antwerp is kept ready for a flight to a place nobody can raise on the radio. Whether anyone is out there is for a story to find out.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

The dead take from the dead, by hand. Open a dead one while its blood is still in it and take out what is sound: blood, a part, or both. Open yourself where the bad part is, take it out and leave it there, and set the new one in; it knits only while the kill's blood is in the part. Blood to blood: nothing by mouth, nothing from the living. A body is good until it is not, blood first to go, solid parts last. Keep both on purpose, if it fits and works.

This is where the kinds come from. A walker tears open one just finished and jams what comes out into its own wounds, by instinct. The city finishes its dead and leaves them, and made the kinds without knowing it. One that thinks can choose.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

Now and then a dead one comes back to itself. Not at once: a walker for days, then a thought, then another, and the horror of noticing. It remembers who it was. The body answers late at first; as blood moves and parts work it answers faster and finer, until the hands can do a surgeon's work.

A few dozen have woken in the city since the first spring. A lucid one stays itself on blood: untended, the blood goes stale in about ten days and the mind goes under with it, and most went under. Fresh blood buys ten days more. Blood, a heart, kidneys and a liver working stop the rot for good. Five lasted, and lead. Each feels it when a new one wakes within a few miles, the way the hunger feels the living.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

A lucid one needs parts, in about this order:
• Blood, first and again, the stale let out, to thin what has congealed.
• A heart, to move it.
• Lungs: breath, which is a voice.
• Kidneys and a liver, or the blood sours in days.
• A gut, before anything by mouth.
• Eyes, if its own have clouded; skin, which closes only over moving blood.
Parts keep; blood is the clock. Then additions: a sprinter's legs, a hulk's bone, a mimic's cords, a lantern's skin, a drowned one's lungs, a Shepherd's pull, whatever the wild ones carry. Each is cut from a fresh kill by hand and set in where the old came out. Keep both, a second heart, if it fits and works. A small one's parts are too small to knit.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

Every dead thing wants the living, and a lucid one wants them too. It is not malice: the living are the freshest parts there are, and the body knows it as a drowning body knows air. Near the living it rises until it is the loudest thing in the head. At the wire, with two and a half thousand of them behind it, it is a roar.

It can be refused. That is what lucid means: a walker is the hunger and nothing else; a lucid one has the hunger and something beside it saying no. A living kill would serve better than a dead one, and that is the line it holds or does not. Each refusal is easier than the last; each day it takes nothing is harder. Only what it takes from the dead quiets it for long. Nothing ends it.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

A Shepherd is a dead one the others follow. Not by sight or voice: a pull, the drift walkers have toward each other, gathered in one body and pointed. It is a drift, not a command. A herd with one does not scatter when the noise stops; it turns as one thing and goes where the Shepherd goes. From a tower a Shepherd is a walker in a crowd that happens to move well.

The city has many; a herd of thousands has one somewhere in it. A lucid one that takes a Shepherd's pull gets the drift and a wider sense of where the others are, not obedience. But a lucid one is patient, and patience and a drift move a herd where it wants. That is what the five who lead did.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

Each of the five who lead is lucid, one who outlasted the rot and then took a Shepherd's pull. Each felt the new one wake and wants something of it.
• The Gate Actual: tall, built from many bodies, a mimic's cords in its throat. It wants one tested at that gate to find the way in; it pays in parts.
• The Pilot: a drowned one's lungs. It wants the new one's parts.
• The Conductor: a screamer's throat. It wants a second above ground.
• The Lamplighter: a lantern's skin. It talks, remembers its name, wants company, and is the most like a person.
• The Chaplain: it builds, and wants the new one as material.
They come slowly, herds first. Each can be finished, and its parts taken, the pull among them.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

Some of the city's new dead are the dead's own work: parts set where no part belongs, by instinct. Some are not, and the dead side cannot explain them either. A wild part comes out and knits like any part, by hand, while the kill's blood is in it, and then it does what it did in its first body, however impossible: a second face sees behind, lit ribs light the dark.

It shows. Grey skin can pass for living at a distance; a second face cannot. Each wild part that shows makes the one who carries it read less human, and a living person who sees one hunts harder. The leaders want the same parts. The only one of its kind, once finished, does not come again.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

The Line is the airlift's queue, still queueing. The tens of thousands left on Causeway Road when the gate closed died there and rose where they stood, facing the gate, and the Gate Actual's pull holds them: a drift toward the gate, the drift that draws the city's new dead down the road to fall in. The burns kill its head and it refills. That is why the Line stays.

Inside it the pull is a tide in the chest from somewhere ahead, and standing days pass blank. The voices at the wire are the Gate Actual's own throat saying borrowed names, and the Night Fence is it testing. It waits for the base. A lucid one in its Line is one it felt wake, and it will make an offer: parts, for a way in.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

The bodies from the bridge go to the Chaplain. The island finishes its dead, but a finished body is good until it is not, and its solid parts last; porters carry them off the far end in the dark to the Chaplain on the Hollandale shore. It opens them and sets what is sound into other dead, by hand, and they stand still for it. The grown-together masses and the stranger shapes on that shore are its work, made from the island's dead.

The bodies do not keep the herds off. The Chaplain keeps them off, because the bodies keep coming and it has no reason to cross while they do. It is lucid; it chooses what it builds. It wants the new one as material.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Vickery, the Stacks or the island says it.

The Pilot lives on the bottom of Gannet Bay. It took a drowned one's lungs and more, needs no air, and the drowned of the harbor are its herd: when they rise at the Stacks' berths all at once and go back down together, that is its pull. It stands off the Landing because the Landing is its larder. The turned-away die there waiting, and most who die there die to the Pilot's drowned, who carry what is sound down to it.

It has opened two lucid ones on the bay floor already and kept what it wanted. It wants the new one's parts, and it cannot be heard coming.

New Antwerp is a zombie-apocalypse setting eighteen months in, built on one rule: infection is a carrier state, not a countdown. A carrier is not sick and may never be; they rise when they die, of anything. A city of eight million is dark. Vickery Air Force Base tests everyone at its gate and admits no carrier; the Stacks, a container port across Gannet Bay, take the carriers in as hands; Dismas Island, the city jail, locks everyone in at night and sides with nobody.

For card authors:
• The world injects on the words in a scene. A greeting that says Vickery, Causeway Road, a red band and the dead fires the setting on turn one.
• The server runs the ground line: each turn it says which of the dead may arrive and where, now and then something never seen before, and rarely the only one of its kind, the same creature whenever it comes in one chat. Between offers the narrator invents no new shape. The five leaders are named canon and the one exception.
• The ground line's last sentence says which animals have turned, by the chat's turn count; no animal beyond it appears.
• Some of the dead are the size of children. They are the dead, not children, and the living's words for them never say child: smalls, short ones, juvies. When one is finished it is a line on the page, never lingered on, and its parts are too small to knit.
• Seventeen kinds are named; use the names. Four more shapes have been seen and have no name: describe them, and let a living character name one in play.
• The world has two sides. Sections 01 to 07 are what the living know. Section 08, The Dead Side, is what the dead do among themselves; no living character knows it. A card's {{user}} may be living or dead; a dead {{user}} is the one who learns it.

Deliberately unknown to the living, and kept so: where it came from, whether there is a cure, why the kinds differ, and what is left beyond the city. The living do not answer these; the dead side answers only the third, and not for the wild ones.

Seventeen named kinds and four unnamed shapes. The ground line keeps each to its ground.

• Walker — slow, tireless; nearly all of them. Ground: everywhere.
• Crawler — legs gone; low, under cars. Ground: streets, rooms, the Kills, warehouses, rail, the Line, subway.
• Screamer — screams; all in earshot come. Ground: streets, parks, subway.
• Hulk — huge; comes through walls. Ground: warehouses, institutions, streets, the Stacks, high-rises.
• Feral — fast on all fours; climbs, alone. Ground: roofs, rail.
• Sprinter — as fast as the living. Ground: crowds, streets, the Line.
• Bloater — bursts; the spray carries it. Ground: rooms, warehouses, high-rises, shops, the Stacks.
• Spitter — bile that blinds and infects. Ground: crowds, the Line, rooms, institutions, subway, high-rises.
• Stalker — takes the last in line. Ground: streets, roofs, crowds, parks, subway, Hollandale, rail, warehouses.
• Sleeper — still until touched. Ground: rooms, institutions, high-rises, the jail, subway, shops, churches, the Stacks.
• Tin Man — helmet and vest. Ground: institutions, the jail, the wire, rail.
• Weeper — cries in the dark; leave it. Ground: rooms, institutions, high-rises, churches, the jail.
• Drowned — walk the bottom. Ground: water only.
• Mimic — repeats the last loud sound. Ground: streets, parks, subway, the Kills.
• Lantern — lit from inside. Ground: the Kills, parks, high-rises, at night only.
• Porter — carries the fresh dead off. Ground: only where there has been killing.
• Burnt — walked through fire. Ground: burned ground, the Line.

Seen, not named; describe them: a tall one with stretched limbs (the Kills, the wire, parks, at night); several grown into one mass (Hollandale); forearms folded into bone hooks (rail, subway, warehouses); one kneeling over an opened body (churches, sewers).

Herds fill avenues and the expressway; nests are buildings packed still. Small ones: rooms and institutions. Animals turn by stage: rats, dogs, horses and deer, then birds.

• April, the first spring — the dead get up. Within days New Antwerp is dark.
• The Airlift, eleven days — Vickery's C-17s fly about forty thousand people out to reception centers inland. The aircraft that go out stop coming back. The last one in, on the eleventh night, lands with only its crew, who will not say what they saw; two of them die within a week.
• The twelfth day — the main gate closes with tens of thousands still on Causeway Road. They die there, and the Line begins.
• The first month — the wing commander and the vice commander die. Lieutenant Colonel Maren Strand takes command; Chief Master Sergeant Luis Arrieta keeps the manifest. The Spirit of New Antwerp is kept fueled for a flight that may never go.
• The first summer — the base gives up its outer fence and holds the inner wire. Families cross the Dismas Bridge to the island, and the Table forms. Local 1919 and the stranded crews wall the Port Wyck terminal with containers: the Stacks. The alliance is struck, fuel for food and carriers for hands. Two salvage gangs are caught by herds out of the subway, and the gangs stop going below ground.
• The first year — gasoline goes stale. Jet fuel and treated diesel still burn, and Vickery's fuel farm becomes the economy.
• The first winter — cold slows the dead and kills the living. The holdouts thin.
• The second year — the living name the still ones in the herds: the Gate Actual, the Pilot, the Conductor, the Lamplighter, the Chaplain. The Line leans on the inner wire at night.
• Late October, now — first frosts. Major Albescu has told Strand there are four months of test cartridges left; there are six weeks. The second winter is coming.

New Antwerp stands on a great harbor where the Wyck River meets the sea. The core island runs between the Wyck on the west and the East Channel on the east.

• The Point — the core island's southern tip: the towers, the old financial district, the subway's hub, Fort Amstel.
• Midtown — the middle of the core island: avenues, high-rises, Varick Park with its reservoir and zoo, St. Nicholas Cathedral, Union Terminal.
• Oostkerk — east across the East Channel: rowhouses, walk-ups, the old Dutch church, the El.
• Hollandale — north across the Wyck: the thirty-five tower blocks of the Hollandale Houses, facing Dismas Island.
• Wyckside — the Wyck's west bank: rail yards, warehouses, the meatpacking district, the old piers.
• The Kills — the south district: salt marsh and creeks, landfill and the sewage works, between the city and Gannet Bay. Causeway Road crosses it.
• Gannet Bay — wide and shallow, south of the city. Vickery is on its east shore, on the marsh; the Stacks are on its west shore at the harbor mouth.
• Dismas Island — in the Wyck north of Midtown, off the Hollandale shore. One bridge, the Dismas Bridge, to Hollandale.

Distances:
• Vickery's main gate to the edge of the Point: eleven miles, up Causeway Road and the expressway.
• The Line: the last mile of Causeway Road before the main gate.
• The Landing: a pier on the bay shore outside the wire, a quarter mile from the main gate.
• Vickery to the Stacks: five miles across the bay by water, by the boat or the fuel barge; about twenty by road, through the city.
• Dismas Island to the Point: six miles by the river.

What the dead do among themselves, on one page; no living character knows any of it. For a card whose {{user}} is dead, this page is the rulebook.

• By hand. The dead take from the dead: open a fresh one and take out what is sound; open yourself where the bad part is, take it out and leave it there, set the new in. It knits only while the kill's blood is in the part. Nothing by mouth; nothing from the living.
• Good until it is not: blood goes first, solid parts last. Take all that is sound; keep both if it fits and works.
• Parts keep; blood is the clock. Untended, a lucid one's blood goes stale in about ten days and the mind with it; fresh blood buys ten more. Blood, a heart, kidneys and a liver working stop the rot for good.
• The kinds are the mindless dead doing this by instinct, on the dead the city finishes and leaves.
• Wild parts. Some new dead are parts set where none belong; some nothing here explains. A taken part does what it did in its first body, however impossible, and it shows. The only one of its kind, finished, does not return.
• The lucid. A few dozen have woken since the first spring; most went under in ten days. Five lasted, took a Shepherd's pull, and lead. They feel a new one wake within a few miles.
• Shepherds. The drift the dead have toward each other, gathered in one body and pointed; a drift, not a command.
• The hunger. Every dead thing wants the living; a lucid one can refuse, and that is its line.
• The five. The Gate Actual holds the Line and wants a way in; the Pilot keeps the bay floor and wants parts; the Conductor calls through the tunnels and wants a second above ground; the Lamplighter lights the towers and wants company; the Chaplain builds from the bridge bodies and wants material. Each can be finished, its parts taken, the pull among them. The small ones' parts are too small to knit.

For the narrator: the living say none of this. Albescu may suspect and tell no one. The dead side is told from the dead side or not at all.