The sun dropped behind the western tree line at 6:47 PM, and the golf course transformed from a landscape into an abstraction -- shapes without depth, distances without scale, the fairways and sand traps and ornamental plantings collapsing into a single dark plane interrupted only by the things that moved on it.
Kevin couldn't count them anymore. That was the first problem. During daylight, the zombies were inventory -- discrete units with positions and behaviors that could be logged and tracked and converted into data points on Carl's legal pad. In the dark, they were something else. Sounds. Shuffling on the practice green. The creak of weight shifting on the wooden walkway. An intermittent scraping against the south wall that could have been one contact or five.
"Forty-seven confirmed before sunset," Carl said through the walkie-talkie. He was on the second floor, alternating between windows, his yellow legal pad open to a page that was running out of room. "I counted four new arrivals in the last hour of light. But I can't track them now. The north-facing suite has partial moonlight through the clouds -- enough to see shapes on the putting green. The south and west are dark."
"Best estimate?"
"Fifty. Possibly more. The arrivals weren't slowing."
Fifty. Kevin sat in his conference room chair and processed the number through the frameworks Karen had given him. Fifty contacts at thirty-five pounds of force each was seventeen hundred and fifty pounds of potential pressure. The front door's mortar would last, at Karen's estimate, ninety seconds under that load. The restaurant windows behind the dining-table barricades would last less. The maintenance walkway's glass walls, already the weakest structural element, would shatter under the weight of six or seven bodies.
The fire door was the last line on that approach. Ninety minutes, Derek had said. Ninety minutes of commercial-grade fire resistance applied to a problem the door's manufacturer had never imagined and would have found, Kevin suspected, philosophically troubling.
The upload bar read fifty-two percent. Marcus had adjusted the laptop screen to minimum brightness, the blue-white glow reduced to a faint smear in the dark conference room. They'd killed all interior lights when the sun went down -- Kevin's order, based on the logic that light attracted attention and they'd already attracted enough. The building was dark, the generator humming in the basement on reduced load, running the satellite uplink and the freezer and nothing else.
"Marcus. Time to completion?"
"Seven hours at current throughput. One-point-one megabytes sustained. The satellite link is actually performing better after dark -- less solar interference on the uplink frequency." Marcus was a shape in the dark, cross-legged on the floor, his face underlit by the laptop's glow. "We're looking at one, maybe two AM for the full transfer."
Seven hours. Kevin filed this number alongside fifty zombies and seventeen hundred fifty pounds and ninety minutes and every other figure that was racing toward a finish line he couldn't see. The math wasn't hard. The math was the easiest part. What was hard was the number that none of them could calculate -- the rate at which fifty evolved, coordinated, intelligent dead things outside learned that glass was weaker than oak.
---
At 7:14 PM, thirty-six hours after the road crossing, Karen appeared in the conference room doorway.
"Your arm," she said.
Kevin had almost forgotten. The scratch. The zombie's fingernail on the road, the skin broken, the 8% probability that Karen had calculated in the forest and that had been hanging over him like a number on a spreadsheet that might be a rounding error or might be a catastrophic misallocation of resources. The scratch had been cleaned, bandaged, re-cleaned, and re-bandaged twice since. The skin around it was pink but not inflamed. No redness tracking up the veins. No discoloration spreading from the wound edge. No fever, no tremor, no cognitive disruption, no onset of the symptoms that Karen had described in her clinical monotone as "initial presentation indicators."
She unwrapped the bandage in the dark, using a penlight she'd found in the pro shop's drawer -- a small, focused beam that illuminated the scratch without broadcasting through the windows. Her fingers were precise. The bandage came away clean. She examined the wound edge, the surrounding skin, the lymph nodes in his inner elbow and armpit. She pressed two fingers to his wrist and counted.
"Pulse: sixty-eight. Temperature by palpation: normal. No lymphadenopathy. No erythema beyond the expected healing response. Wound edges are granulating."
"Translation."
"At thirty-six hours post-exposure with no symptom presentation, the probability of infection drops to approximately three percent." Karen rewrapped the bandage. Clean gauze, medical tape, the same professional wrapping she'd been doing since the building. "The thirty-six-hour window is significant. Ninety-seven percent of infections present symptoms within that timeframe. The remaining three percent are statistical outliers -- immunocompromised individuals, unusual pathogen load, atypical exposure vectors."
"So I'm probably fine."
"You are within the ninety-seven percent probability of non-infection. 'Probably fine' is an acceptable colloquial translation." Karen's penlight clicked off. "The forty-eight-hour mark reduces probability to less than one percent. At seventy-two hours, it's functionally zero."
Kevin sat in the dark with his rewrapped arm and his braced knee and the knowledge that the scratch was almost certainly nothing -- that the 8% had narrowed to 3% and would narrow further, that his body had fought off the contact or the contact had been too shallow or the pathogen load too low or whatever mechanical explanation applied to the biological reality that he was alive and human and staying that way.
Three percent. Thirty-six hours ago, he'd been watching this number the way he watched the upload bar -- willing it to move, counting the time, treating his own body as a system with a progress indicator that would eventually reach completion. Now the number had moved, and the relief should have been enormous, and it was -- but it was also smaller than he'd expected, because the scratch had stopped being the thing he was most afraid of somewhere around the point where the zombies started testing the front door.
"Thank you, Karen."
"The bandage change was scheduled regardless of the probability assessment. You're welcome." She paused. In the dark, he couldn't see her face, but the pause had weight -- the hesitation of someone about to say something outside her operational parameters. "Kevin. The forty-eight-hour mark is twelve hours from now. The upload completes in seven. The temporal alignment is favorable."
She meant: you'll know you're safe and the data will be uploaded on roughly the same schedule. She meant: two of the three problems might resolve themselves by morning. She meant something like optimism, expressed through temporal alignment and probability windows, and it was the most Karen form of encouragement he'd ever received.
"Get some rest," he said. "Your watch is at zero-two-hundred."
"I don't require rest."
"That wasn't a request, Karen. It was a deployment of resources. You're more effective at two AM if you sleep now. The numbers support this."
Silence. Then the faint rustle of fabric as she turned to leave. "Acceptable logic," she said.
---
Carl's voice came through the walkie-talkie at 8:03 PM, and his tone had changed.
Not louder. Not panicked. Tighter. The vocal equivalent of the focusing ring on a camera being twisted until something that was blurry became sharp and the sharpness revealed a detail you wished you hadn't seen.
"Kevin. They're moving."
Kevin crutched to the conference room window. The golf course was dark -- a vast, unlit expanse broken only by the faint geometric shapes of the sand traps, which held the last ambient light in their pale sand. The zombies were invisible. But they weren't silent.
Footsteps. Dozens of them. Not the aimless shuffling of the building -- these were coordinated, rhythmic, the sound of multiple bodies moving in the same direction at roughly the same pace. The sound came from the south, from the maintenance area, and it was growing louder.
"Which direction?"
"West. The south cluster is moving west along the eighteenth fairway. The west cluster is holding position near the pro shop entrance. The north group--" Carl paused. When he came back, his voice was half a note higher. "The north group has grown. I can see at least twelve shapes on the putting green. There were six at sunset."
"They're redistributing."
"They're doing more than that. Watch the maintenance walkway."
Kevin couldn't see the maintenance walkway from the conference room. He could hear it. The covered corridor connecting the clubhouse to the cart barn was wood and glass, and wood and glass made sounds when things pressed against them -- the vocabulary of structural stress that Kevin had been learning all day.
A tap. A single point of contact against glass. Testing.
A second tap. Different spot. Same panel.
A third. And then a fourth, and the fourth wasn't a tap but a push -- sustained, leaning pressure that made the glass pane hum in its frame the way a wine glass hums when a wet finger circles its rim.
"Derek," Kevin said into the radio. "Walkway status."
Derek's voice came back from the east wing. Close to the fire door. "I'm hearing contact on the walkway glass. Multiple points. The vibration is transmitting through the wall into the corridor." A pause filled with listening. "Three, maybe four contacts against the outer glass panels. The panels are single-pane, quarter-inch commercial float glass in wooden mullions. Design load is wind and rain. Not lateral biological pressure."
"Will they hold?"
"Kevin, quarter-inch float glass fractures at approximately twenty-four megapascals of stress. The panels are eighteen by thirty-six inches. A seventy-kilogram body leaning against a panel of that size generates roughly--" The sound of Derek doing math he'd never expected to need. "One megapascal. The panels hold against one contact. Two contacts puts us at marginal. Three or more per panel, and the glass goes."
Through the floor and the walls, Kevin heard the walkway answer Derek's calculation. The hum deepened. The frames creaked -- wood under torsion, the joints between mullion and header working against screws that were designed for aesthetics and maintained by a groundskeeper whose primary concern had been keeping the brass fittings polished.
Then the sound of glass breaking.
Not the explosive shatter of a window hit by a rock. A structural failure -- a long, spreading crack that started as a single line and propagated through the pane in a fractal pattern, the glass losing integrity in slow motion, pieces falling inward to the walkway floor with the chiming sound of broken crystal. The first panel gone.
"Panel down," Derek said. His voice was the controlled corporate neutral -- the tone that meant the numbers were bad but the presentation was still in progress. "Southeast section, approximately four meters from the cart barn junction. I can hear them in the walkway. They're inside the corridor."
"Fire door?"
"Closed and locked. They'll have to come through thirty meters of walkway to reach it. The walkway floor is littered with glass fragments. That may slow them."
"May."
"I have limited data on zombie response to glass lacerations, Kevin. Based on observation, pain response appears absent. So 'may' is generous."
Kevin gripped the walkie-talkie. The walkway was breached. The fire door was the barrier. Ninety minutes of rated resistance between the east wing and however many dead things were now navigating a corridor full of broken glass in the dark.
"Everyone to the conference room," Kevin said. "Now."
---
They assembled in seven minutes. Derek and Bradley from the east wing. Carl from the second floor. Karen from the guest suite where she hadn't been sleeping. Rachel from the observation post. Marcus from the floor beside his laptop. Priya from wherever Priya went when Priya wasn't being Priya -- the second-floor suite, Kevin assumed, where she sat in the chair by the window and watched things that her training had prepared her to watch and that no training could have prepared her to watch.
Eight people in a dark conference room, the only light the laptop's diminished glow and the faint gray of moonlight through the windows. The upload bar at fifty-four percent.
"Walkway glass is breached," Kevin said. "Southeast section. Contacts are inside the corridor. The fire door is holding. We have maybe ninety minutes on that door. Maybe less, depending on how many of them get in and whether they can figure out how to push in coordination."
"They can," Carl said. "Based on everything I've observed today, coordinated pressure is within their behavioral repertoire. The front-door test involved five contacts pushing in a semi-synchronized pattern. If the walkway group reaches the fire door and applies the same approach, the door's resistance time decreases proportional to the force applied."
"Karen. Numbers."
Karen didn't need to consult notes. "The fire door is rated for ninety minutes against thermal exposure. Lateral pressure resistance is lower -- the door is not load-bearing. It's mounted on a steel frame with three hinges and a deadbolt. Maximum lateral force before frame deformation: approximately four hundred pounds sustained. Six contacts at thirty-five pounds each exceeds this threshold. Estimated time to breach under sustained coordinated pressure from six or more contacts: forty to sixty minutes."
"So we have forty minutes minimum from the time they reach the fire door."
"From the time they apply sustained coordinated pressure. The approach through the walkway, the assembly at the door, and the development of coordinated pushing behavior -- those add time. Unknown time, but time."
Kevin looked around the table. Eight faces, half-visible in the laptop's glow. Derek, jaw set, the corporate composure locked in place over whatever was underneath. Karen, upright, calculating. Carl, clutching his legal pad, the behavioral data that had predicted this scenario sitting in his hands like an accusation. Marcus, one hand on the laptop, protecting the upload the way a parent protects a child. Rachel, still, the combat stillness he'd seen on the road when she'd killed three zombies with a kitchen knife. Priya, watching everyone else with the trained focus that Kevin now understood was assessment, not passivity. Bradley, in his chair, hands on the armrests, the CEO posture that had become a kind of armor he couldn't remove.
"The upload needs seven more hours," Kevin said. "The fire door gives us an hour at most. Those numbers don't work."
"We move the upload to the roof," Marcus said. "The ethernet cable reaches the wall jack, which connects to the satellite infrastructure through the building's internal wiring. If the dish is roof-mounted, there's a junction box on the roof. I can splice into it directly. We take the laptop up, I make the connection, the upload continues from the roof while we're already at the exit point."
"Can you do that?"
"It's Cat5 cable and a satellite modem junction. I can do it with a screwdriver and ten minutes." Marcus was already running the logistics. "The laptop battery has about four hours at current draw. That's not enough for seven hours. But the junction box on the roof should have a power feed from the building's electrical system. If the generator is still running, I can draw power at the roof level."
"If it's wired for power."
"A commercial satellite installation on a resort this expensive? It's wired for power. These dishes are heated to prevent ice accumulation. There's a power line running to the roof. I'd bet the laptop on it."
"You are betting the laptop on it."
"Good thing it's not mine."
Kevin turned to Carl. "North side. What's the situation?"
"Twelve contacts as of my last count, distributed across the practice range. The maintenance ladder descends to the east edge of the putting green, which puts it approximately sixty meters from the nearest north-side contact. In the dark, visibility is poor for both us and them. We might be able to descend without immediate detection." Carl paused. "But the glass breach changes the calculus. The walkway noise -- the breaking, the contact movement inside the corridor -- is audible from outside. The south and west clusters are responding. I saw movement toward the walkway before I came down. If the noise draws the perimeter inward, the north side might thin further."
"Or the noise draws them around to the north side," Derek said.
"Or that."
Kevin's knee throbbed. The brace pressed against swollen tissue. The crutches leaned against the conference table, two aluminum poles that represented both his mobility and his limitation -- he could move, but he couldn't move fast, and speed was the currency they'd be spending on the roof and the ladder and the eighty meters of open putting green.
"Here's the plan," Kevin said. "Phase one: Marcus takes the laptop to the roof. Splices into the satellite junction. Confirms the upload can continue. Carl goes with him -- Carl knows the roof access and can provide observation from the highest point. That happens now."
"Phase two: if the fire door holds until the upload completes, we walk out of here on our own terms. Use the roof exit, descend the ladder, move north to the tree line. Controlled. Orderly."
"Phase three: if the fire door fails before the upload completes, we still go to the roof. Marcus guards the upload. The rest of us hold the stairwell to the third floor and the roof access until the data is out. Then we descend and run."
"Phase three has a problem," Karen said. "The stairwell is defensible but not sealed. The third floor has multiple access points -- the main stair, the service stair from the kitchen, and an exterior fire escape on the south side. Holding all three against an active breach requires more personnel than we have."
"Then we seal the ones we can and hold the one we can't."
"Which one can't we seal?"
"The main stair. It's the widest. It's the one they'll find first. And it's the one that has a straight line of sight to the conference room, which means they're already oriented toward it." Kevin pointed at the map, though no one could see the map in the dark. They didn't need to. They'd all studied it. "Derek, you and Bradley barricade the service stair. Kitchen entrance, right?"
"Correct. The kitchen has a commercial door to the service corridor, which connects to the service stair. I can block it with the same method we used on the service entrance -- mobile shelving, prep tables, dead weight."
"Karen, fire escape."
"The south fire escape is an exterior metal structure accessible through a window on the third floor's south hallway. I'll secure the window. The escape itself can be disabled by removing the lowest ladder section, which drops to ground level on a counterweight mechanism. I'll jam it."
"Everyone else -- main stair. Rachel, Priya, with me. We hold the third-floor landing."
"With what?" Rachel asked. Her voice was flat. Not afraid -- assessing. The voice of a woman who'd killed three zombies with a knife and was calibrating her readiness to do it again. "We have the axe, the pry bar, and whatever kitchen implements we can carry."
"We have elevation. We have a choke point. And we have the fact that stairs are harder to climb than floors are to cross." Kevin shifted in his chair. The knee objected. He overruled it. "This is contingency only. The fire door might hold for hours. They might not apply enough pressure. Carl's behavioral data suggests they test and withdraw, not test and commit. But if the worst case happens, we have positions and we have a plan and we don't have to improvise."
The conference room was quiet. The upload bar crept past fifty-four percent. Through the floor, transmitted through stone and wood and a century of construction, the sound of movement in the east-wing walkway continued -- the shuffling, probing advance of things that had broken through the first barrier and were working their way toward the second.
"Questions," Kevin said.
"One," Bradley said. His voice came from the dark corner of the room, the CEO's chair, the seat he'd taken at every meeting since their arrival. "The north side. The ladder. You said eighty meters to the tree line."
"Approximately."
"And Karen calculated seven minutes for you to cross that distance with crutch assistance."
"Karen calculated seven minutes."
"In daylight. On level ground. With visibility." Bradley's voice was measured. Not challenging. Factual. The CEO delivering a risk assessment to a board he was, for once, actually part of. "In the dark, on a putting green that's been churned by zombie foot traffic, with twelve or more contacts in proximity and compromised visibility for the team member providing physical support -- the seven minutes becomes ten. Twelve. Fifteen. That's fifteen minutes of exposure for the entire group, because nobody leaves until the slowest person is across."
"That's what I said. Nobody gets left behind."
"I'm not suggesting we leave anyone behind. I'm suggesting we address the bottleneck." Bradley stood. Kevin heard the chair push back, the footsteps -- slow, deliberate, the old man's walk that was somehow more dignified than it had any right to be. "I played this course. Twice. The putting green has a maintenance shed at its northwest corner. The shed has a golf cart."
Silence.
"The carts are electric," Bradley continued. "Four-seat models. Top speed approximately fifteen miles per hour. Range approximately thirty miles on a full charge. They were charging in the cart barn when we arrived -- plugged into the wall units. If even one of them holds a charge, we drive the putting green instead of walking it. The slowest member becomes irrelevant because the cart doesn't care about knee injuries."
Marcus leaned forward. "The cart barn is through the maintenance walkway. The walkway that currently has zombies in it."
"The cart barn has an external roll-up door facing the service road on the east side. The service road connects to the access path that runs along the north side of the building. The path passes approximately twenty meters from the base of the maintenance ladder." Bradley was precise. Not corporate-imprecise, not the vague directives of a man who delegated details. Precise. The precision of someone who'd walked this property twice and remembered the layout because the golf had been good and the course had been beautiful and the kind of mind that remembered beauty also remembered geography. "We don't go through the walkway. We go around. Someone reaches the cart barn from the outside, opens the roll-up door, retrieves a cart, and drives it to the base of the ladder."
"Someone has to cross the perimeter to reach the cart barn," Karen said.
"Yes."
"Through zombie-occupied territory."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
The word sat in the dark conference room like an object placed on the table. Kevin felt it. Everyone felt it. The plan was good -- the golf cart solved the mobility problem, converted fifteen minutes of exposure to three, turned the putting green from a killing field to a transit corridor. But the price was a solo mission through the zombie perimeter to the cart barn, and the price was denominated in a currency they couldn't afford to spend.
"We'll address the cart barn approach when we need to," Kevin said. "Right now, phase one. Marcus, Carl -- roof. Confirm the upload can be relocated. Then come back and report."
Marcus closed the laptop. The room went dark. Then the penlight clicked on -- the same small beam Karen had used on Kevin's arm, now in Marcus's hand, pointed at the floor, a circle of light no bigger than a dinner plate.
"Give us fifteen minutes," Marcus said.
They left. The conference room held six people and the sound of the walkway and the dark and the number fifty-four, which was the percentage of data uploaded and the number of people who'd died the first day and the age of the building's mortar and none of those things and all of those things, because numbers were what Kevin had when the dark took everything else.
---
At 9:22 PM, the fire door spoke.
Kevin was in the east wing hallway with Derek and Bradley, positioned fifteen feet from the door, listening. The walkway beyond had been active for over an hour -- shuffling, the crunch of glass underfoot, the occasional impact of a body against the corridor walls. The sounds had been individual, scattered, the noise of things exploring a space they'd entered. Not organized. Not directed. Just present.
At 9:22, the quality of the sound changed.
A thud against the fire door. Not a push -- something heavier. A body thrown against the surface, or falling against it, the impact transmitting through the steel and into the hallway where three men stood in the dark and listened.
A second thud. Same spot. The door shuddered in its frame -- a visible vibration, the steel flexing under impact, the hinges absorbing the shock and transmitting it to the wall anchors.
Then the pushing began. Not impact -- sustained pressure. The characteristic lean that the front-door group had demonstrated, applied now to a commercial fire door by an unknown number of contacts in a corridor too dark to assess. The door held. The frame held. The hinges held. But the sound was different from the front door -- the front door was oak in limestone, and the sound had been creaking mortar. This was steel in steel, and the sound was a low, metallic groan, the vibration of materials designed for heat resistance being tested by force, and the groan was continuous.
"How many?" Kevin asked.
Derek had his ear closer to the door than Kevin was comfortable with. "I can distinguish individual pressure patterns. At least four. Possibly six. The walkway is narrow -- it constrains how many can push at once. Maximum frontage is three abreast."
"Three abreast, two rows deep."
"Or more rows. The corridor extends thirty meters. If it's full--"
"Is it full?"
Derek listened. The groan continued. The door vibrated in its frame, a sustained oscillation that Kevin could feel through the floor.
"I don't think so. The glass breach was a single panel. The opening is approximately eighteen by thirty-six inches. They're entering one at a time. It's a bottleneck. At the rate I've been hearing arrivals -- one every three to four minutes -- the current walkway population is probably eight to twelve."
"Karen said the door holds against four hundred pounds sustained."
"Twelve contacts exceeds that. But they're not all at the door. Some are in the corridor. Some are at the glass breach. The push-capable number at the door face is limited by the corridor width." Derek stepped back from the door. "Eighty to a hundred pounds right now. The door holds. But the pressure will increase as more enter and move toward the contact point."
The groan pulsed. A rhythm to it -- the push-and-release pattern that Carl had observed at the front door. Not continuous force. Waves. Test and assess, push and listen, the iterative methodology that Karen had compared to structural engineering.
"They're learning the door," Kevin said.
"They learned the front door in one session. This is a different material, different sound, different feedback. But the methodology is the same." Derek's voice was steady. The corporate control, the boardroom composure, applied to a situation that no boardroom had ever contained. "My recommendation: we don't wait to see if they figure it out. We execute the roof relocation now. Get the upload to the roof, get everyone to the third floor, and treat the fire door as a timer, not a wall."
Kevin's walkie-talkie crackled. Marcus's voice, thin and wind-roughed from the roof.
"We're on the roof. Satellite junction box is here. It's powered -- the heating element is warm. I can splice the Cat5 into the junction and draw power from the heating circuit. Ten minutes to set up. The upload won't interrupt." A pause. The sound of wind. "Kevin. I can see everything from up here."
"How many?"
"I stopped counting at sixty. They're everywhere. South, west, east. The walkway breach has drawn a crowd -- there are maybe fifteen clustered around the broken panel, feeding into the corridor single file. The front door group has grown to nine or ten. The practice range still has the lowest density. I count eight on the putting green. But Kevin--"
"What?"
"They're not random. I can see the pattern Carl described. The clusters. The anchors. But from up here, there's a larger pattern. The clusters are positioned around the building at even intervals. Like -- I don't know how to describe it. Like coverage. Like they're making sure every approach is watched." Marcus's voice tightened. "These aren't animals clustering around food. This is a perimeter. A cordon. They've surrounded us."
Kevin stood in the dark hallway with his crutches and his bad knee and the fire door groaning behind him and the walkie-talkie delivering intelligence from the roof that confirmed what he'd been assembling from fragments all day -- that the things outside weren't a crowd, weren't a horde, weren't the mindless mob that every zombie story had trained him to expect. They were a force. Organized, patient, adaptive. Learning from every test and applying the lessons.
The fire door groaned again. Louder. The push wave crested and held for three seconds before releasing. The longest sustained push yet. The learning curve was measured in seconds and the door's resistance was measured in minutes and the distance between those units was shrinking.
"Marcus," Kevin said. "Set up the junction. Get the upload running from the roof. Don't come back down."
"Copy."
Kevin turned to Derek and Bradley. In the dark, they were silhouettes -- Derek tall and rigid, Bradley shorter, leaning on nothing, standing on his own feet in the dark hallway with the door behind them and the stairwell ahead and a building that was becoming less of a shelter with every passing minute.
"Wake everyone," Kevin said. "Third floor. Now."
The fire door groaned a third time, and this time, somewhere in the groan, Kevin heard a different sound -- not metal flexing, but metal shifting. The hinges. The top hinge, specifically. Moving a fraction of a millimeter in its anchor. Not failure. Not yet. The first syllable of a word the door was going to say eventually, and when it finished the word, the word would be "through."
Kevin crutched toward the stairwell, and his knee screamed, and the building's walls carried the sound of sixty dead things tightening their circle, and the upload bar -- somewhere above him now, on a laptop on a roof under a satellite dish in the dark -- read fifty-six percent, and seven hours had become a number that mattered more than any number Kevin had calculated in twenty years of software development, because this was the only program that would ever run where a failed deployment meant everyone died.
The stair rose ahead of him. He took the first step. The crutches bit into the carpet. The knee objected.
He took the second step anyway.
