The fear hit him hard.

He was no stranger to the fear. He’d felt it in San Francisco, whenever he thought too hard about what had happened to Karen and Jake. On the road to Olympia he’d felt it plenty of times, whenever he saw a drooler, whenever he just thought one might be nearby.

It was a different kind of fear than those he’d known before the Flu came. It started with a rumbling in his guts, as if he were about to shit himself. It grew threw him, spreading ice through his veins. It paralyzed his limbs and cancelled out all thoughts.

He could not move, nor fight, nor do anything useful. Tim could only hold onto the rungs of the ladder. He would have fallen off if he hadn’t been so terrified that his fingers had turned into frozen claws.

The drooler stared down at him silently, its eyes blank, its face as slack as a rubber mask. He could see the sores on its skin weeping black fluid, he could count the number of hairs it had left on its barren head. He could not decide if it was a man or a woman, whether it had been old or young before it got sick. In the dark all droolers looked the same.

A thin ribbon of black slime slid down through the air and stained the shoulder of Tim’s shirt. Revulsion rippled through him until one of his hands came free of its rung.

“God, no,” he shouted, terrified suddenly of falling. That was a nice, normal fear. It was realistic, for one thing. He was nearly twenty feet up in the air. If his other hand let go he would fall to hit the water hard, fall and maybe strike his head on the concrete bottom of the channel and maybe he wouldn’t come back up. He could use that good old-fashioned fear, he decided. It could drive him to get his hand back on the ladder.

So far so good. He put a foot down, reached for the rung below. If he climbed up any farther the drooler would bite his hands, he knew. So down it was.

He took another step down—and the drooler lunged. An arm slid down through space to grab, to scratch at him. The other oozed over the edge as if it had no bones inside. Tim wanted to jump backwards, away from the attack, but that would have been a bad idea. Instead he pushed himself closer to the ladder, shoving his belly and his crotch against the wet concrete. He took another step down.

The drooler lunged forward still farther, scraping across the edge. Its torso and one hip appeared above Tim and then it was on him, jumping down at him and the fear surged up his throat and escaped like steam from a teapot, forming screams in the air as hands grabbed at his clothes, as drool-blackened teeth dug deep into the strap of his pack. He braced himself for the feel of teeth in his flesh, for the inevitability of death.

Then the drooler was gone. Tim’s eyes were closed, so he didn’t see it fall past him. He heard it splash below, a noise so sudden and so loud that it made him wince. Water splashed his shoes and ankles and he scrambled up a step of the ladder just to get away from the splash.

He forced himself to open his eyes. He looked down. The drooler was there, splashing in the water, standing armpit deep, hands raised to grab and pull Tim down. It took a step forward to get to the ladder and fell into the water, unable to put any weight on its left leg. The bone there must have shattered when it hit bottom. In a moment it rose again from the darkness, just its face this time cresting the water, its mouth washed clean and its teeth glistening in the moonlight.

Tim didn’t waste any time getting up the ladder and over the edge. He sprawled out on the concrete there and just breathed for a while, shuddering as the fear nipped and tugged at him. Slowly it drained away from him, even as his pant legs dried.

Without rising he looked around himself, studying his environment. He was watching for more droolers but he didn’t see any. The area where he lay was a great paved space hundreds of yards wide and maybe half a mile long. It was a maze of shipping containers, red and blue and yellow and all rusting in the dark. They waited stacked and ready to be picked up by the long arms of the giant cranes that loomed over the dockyards, unmanned now and reminding Tim of the skeletons of vast dinosaurs caught standing upright by some flash of catastrophe.

He rolled into a sitting position and then took off his pack. One strap was nearly chewed through by the drooler’s teeth but it would hold a while longer. Better the strap than his own skin. He drew out the revolver and stared at it. When the drooler had appeared and the fear hit him, he hadn’t even thought about using it. There had been no time—and his brain had seized up. In that moment he’d been as stupid as his adversary, his highly-trained mind as useless as the rotting grey matter that dripped from holes in the drooler’s soft palate.

He would have to do better than that when he faced Nero.

Tim struggled to his feet and rubbed at his face with his hands. He checked his watch and saw he’d wasted nearly twenty minutes. As soon as he was sure his legs would support him he started loping east at a paced jog. He had work to do.