Not the Only Broadcast

Dax comes off his knees with Cole’s crowbar in both hands.

The fifteen move when he shouts. Not a wave. A spread. Two toward Mary. Three toward the bus. The rest toward Grant, because that is the only math Dax has left.

“Eve,” Grant says.

“I see them.”

The rifle stays on Dax. A woman with a kitchen knife still reaches Mary. Mary does not have Grant’s speed. She has the new slice of it, the five percent that showed up at one-hundred, and it is just enough that the knife hits the pipe Zoya already took off someone else instead of Mary’s ribs. Zoya puts the woman down without hesitation.

Grant meets the first three himself.

A bat. A pipe. Bare hands. Ordinary. He hears the bat start before it moves and takes it away. He does not claim anyone. They are still Dax’s.

Dax knows that. He uses it.

He stays behind two of his and lets them eat the first hits. Then he comes around the van with the crowbar aimed at Grant’s knee, not his head. Low. Mean. The kind of swing you make when your father and brother die in the same twelve hours.

Grant lets it graze the bandage that does not matter anymore. The metal bites cloth. The skin under it does not open. He feels the pressure and then the knit, already finished.

Dax sees that and hates it.

“You don’t deserve to be strong!”

“Maybe not, but you definitely don’t.”

Grant hits him. Dax flies into the folding table and the table breaks. He gets up anyway. Ordinary heart, furious, still breathing, which means fifteen women still belong to him.

On the bus, Jose is yelling at Garret to back up. Garret backs into a post. The horn goes off again, useless.

The east road gets louder.

Grant does not have to look. The new map already has it. The vehicle is two hundred feet away now. Seven blanks that are not blanks anymore — wait. He checks again. Seven points, claimed, tied to the heart in the driver’s seat. They got claimed fast.

“Mary,” he says. “The seven aren’t loose. Somebody already grabbed them.”

“The stranger.”

“Yes.”

Dax hears it too. He laughs with blood in his mouth.

“Good. Backup has arrived. You don’t walk onto a Walsh lot and leave.”

“He seems strange,” Grant says. He can hear the driver’s heart from here. Calm. Not ordinary-calm. The same wrong calm their father had, only steadier.

The vehicle comes off the access road too fast and slams to a stop in a spray of gravel. A dirty SUV. Not the grocery van. Seven women packed in it. A man getting out of the driver’s side like he has all the time in the world.

He is older than Dax. Younger than the dad. Work jacket. No visible weapon. No smile.

He looks at Cole’s body first. Then at Dax. Then at Grant.

“Which one of you dropped Ray?”

Dax points with the bar, desperate for an ally.

“This asshole. My dad. My brother too, ten minutes ago. You help me kill him and we split what’s standing.”

The new man does not look at the fifteen.

He looks at Grant’s hands.

“You hit a hundred today,” he says. Not a question.

Grant feels the thing from when he hit one-hundred, the piece of the upgrade he could not name. It lights up. It points at the man in the jacket the way the map points at blanks. Not a woman. A man. Evolved. The same weight Walsh had, except this one is not pretending to be a problem. This one was too relaxed.

“Who are you?” Grant says.

“Later.” The man tips his chin at Dax. “He yours, or is he still breathing on purpose?”

“He’s still breathing because he isn’t a threat and I saw you coming. I didn’t want to have to deal with his women running loose before we met.”

“I guessed as much.”

Dax starts talking again. The new man does not let him finish. He walks through the fifteen like they are weather. One of them swings a pipe at his head. He catches it without looking, and Grant hears the same early step he himself has, the one that arrives before the room is ready.

Eve’s rifle ticks up.

“Grant.”

“Not yet.”

Dax realizes the arrival is not help. He turns the crowbar toward the jacket instead.

“Don’t you come—”

The new man hits him once.

Dax drops.

Fifteen pulses go blank in the same instant. The yard changes pitch. Women stagger. Some look at Dax. Some look at Grant. Some look at the stranger. For one second nobody belongs to anybody, and that is the distraction Grant didn’t want. He can’t hesitate though.

He moves.

So does the other one.

They hit the loose fifteen from two sides.

Grant takes the nearest wrist while she is still staring at Dax.

“I claim you.”

“Ivy.” She blinks, then locks on him. “Yours. He just— I felt him go.”

101.

The stranger claims one by the van at the same time. Grant hears the words. Same words. The woman folds toward the jacket instead of toward him.

One for each.

Grant takes two more before the stranger can turn. A redhead with a split lip. A short one who tries to run for the dock and does not make it.

“I’m Tori.”

102.

“Nessa.”

103.

The stranger gets a tall one by the second van and another who had the kitchen knife.

Mary shouts, “Don’t bunch! He’s taking the left side!”

Zoya and Magdalena pin, they do not claim. They hold. Grant claims through their hands.

“Gia.”

104.

“Wren.”

105.

The stranger is fast. Not Ray Walsh fast. Hundred-fast. He gets three in a line along the dock while Grant is still clearing the gravel. Grant hears those names too and loses them because they are not his.

Seven left in the yard.

Grant takes four.

“Sable.”

106.

“Hattie.”

107.

“Bex.”

108.

He takes the next wrist.

“I claim you.”

“Noelle.”

109.

The stranger takes the last three by the metal building, including Lila’s friend from the roof who came down too late. Grant feels those holes close on the wrong side of the map.

The yard goes still except for breathing.

Dax is not getting up. Cole is not getting up. Ray is a smear in an alley thirty floors down and a day away.

Grant counts.

One hundred nine of his now. The stranger has the seven from the SUV plus however many he just pulled off the lot. Six from the fifteen. Thirteen that Grant can see.

The man in the jacket wipes his mouth with his thumb and looks at Grant like they just finished a transaction.

“You take fast,” he says. “Ray said there was a grocery boy with a bus. He didn’t say you were at a hundred.”

“He didn’t know.”

“He does now. Or he would.” The man glances at Dax. “Kids never could hold a line. Ray should’ve come himself the first time and not sent those two to a store.”

Mary has Eve’s shoulder. Eve has the rifle on the jacket. The rifle will not matter if he is what Grant thinks he is.

“You felt Ray die,” Grant says.

“Everybody at a hundred felt Ray die.” The man says it like he is talking about weather. “That’s the part you haven’t had time to notice. You popped on the gravel and it went out. I was east with seven leftovers who thought a service road was a plan. I claimed them in the car because they were screaming and the map lit up like a fire alarm. Then I came here to see who just joined the list.”

Grant’s new sense sits there, obvious now that someone has named it.

Not just blanks.

Not just his.

Other hundreds. A direction. A weight. This man in the jacket. And — farther, at the ugly edge of two thousand feet, almost off the water — another one. Faint. Not moving. Or moving slow.

Mary sees his face.

“Grant?”

“There’s another,” he says. “Not him. Past him.”

The man in the jacket smiles with no teeth in it.

“Yeah. That’s the reveal, grocery boy. You thought Ray was the problem on this river. He was just the loud one. There’s a line of us. We don’t share maps and we don’t share girls, but we felt you hit a hundred. Some of us are gonna want a look. Some are gonna want the building.”

He nods at Grant’s bus, at Garret in the Explorer, at the women who just changed owners twice in one afternoon.

“I’m Dale,” he says. “I don’t want your penthouse tonight. I already ate. I came to see if you were sloppy. You’re not sloppy. That’s worse. Sloppy I can ignore.”

He starts back toward the SUV. The thirteen who are his follow without being told. The seven from the east road are already in the seats.

Eve’s voice is tight.

“Grant. If he leaves with those—”

“I know.”

If he chases Dale, Dax’s lot stays open and the faint hundred on the water gets closer. If he stays, Dale drives off with thirteen women Grant just watched go loose.

Dale opens the driver door and looks back once.

“Ray had a radio in the shed. You should listen to it before you board that window back up. He wasn’t talking to his sons.”

Then he is in the seat.

Grant could catch the SUV. He knows that now. The new speed would do it. The healing would take whatever the gravel did. The twenty five-to-thirteen split —from Cole and Dax’s claimed plus the seven freed women — already happened. What is left is a choice about the radio and the second weight on the water.

Mary is beside him, still the one who does not flinch easily.

“If you go after him, you go with a plan,” she says. “If you stay, we clear this lot and we find that radio. Those are the only two smart options. ‘Charge ahead’ is not a plan.”

Grant watches the SUV turn east.

The second hundred on the water does not turn. It waits.

And from the metal building, faint under the wind, a radio that nobody turned off keeps hissing a man’s voice that is not Dale, saying the same two words on a loop like a check-in that never got an answer.

“North lot. North lot. North lot.”