He woke up with a jerk, spittle flying from his face. Tim panicked for a second and wiped at his chin with his hands, then studied them in the grey light coming in through the windows. His saliva was clear and normal, though, and that reassured him enough to get him breathing again, to sit up in the chair and blink his eyes, run his tongue around the foul taste in his mouth. Then he sat up again with a new jerk, a new terror.

Asleep—he had been fallen asleep. What the—what the hell? He rubbed his hands on his jeans, then ran his fingers through his hair. He’d been tired, yes, tired before he even left Vashon Island. He’d been exhausted, to be plain about it. The fear had sucked him dry of what energy he’d had left. So when he’d finally reached safety, when he sat down in the chair, his adrenal glands had stopped firing and he’d crashed. It was normal, a perfectly normal reaction to given stimuli. A stereotyped behavior.

He glanced down at his watch. It was ten thirty in the morning. He’d slept more than eight hours. “Oh, no,” he whined, wanting nothing more than to put his head down on the desk and go back to sleep. Knowing he’d already wasted more than a third of his allotted time in Seattle. He had so much to do, so much more to accomplish before he went back, before he met Sasha down at the docks.

He stood up and all the blood rushed out of his head. He snarled in pain and annoyance but he couldn’t let his body rule him, not anymore. Not if he was going to have a chance at Nero.

Maybe the unscheduled nap had its plus side, though, he thought. The droolers outside would have gotten bored and wandered off while he slept. It would be safe to go outside again. He walked a few steps to the office’s windows and looked down at the snarl of cars and trucks down there.

The droolers looked up. One slack face after another tilted back, dead eyes focusing on him through the glass. Dozens of them. More than he remembered from the night before.

“No,” he said, a rejection. A refusal to accept reality. It didn’t work. The droolers didn’t vanish into thin air. His watch didn’t start running backwards.

He slumped back into the chair. Stared at the ceiling tiles. What was he going to do? What could he do? He was trapped in the office building.

“No,” he said again, and this time it was a decision. He was not going to give up, not so soon after he’d started. There had to be something he could do.

He could try to find a back door, maybe. He could hope there were no droolers back there, or that he could be quiet enough to slip out without any of them noticing his leaving.

He gathered up his pack and headed out of the office. Just in the doorway he felt the fear churning inside of him and he had a sharp urge to go back. To go back in and curl up and go back to sleep, to face the wall. To stop.

Violently shaking his head he moved out into the shadows of the hall. The light was better now that the sun was up and he could see there were three more office doors he hadn’t tried. He doubted he would find anything inside that would be useful. He went to the stairs instead and started down, thinking any rear or fire exit had to be on the ground floor.

He made it down six steps before he smelled them. They had a thick, yeasty smell on top of the general smell of unwashed human bodies. The slime they constantly drooled smelled like the slop bucket outside a brewery. He smelled them long before he saw they’d gotten into the lobby.

But maybe not soon enough. In the dark part of the stairs a drooler was waiting for him, arms outstretched, mouth open. Waiting to suck him in and devour him.

Tim jumped back, screaming, and slid down four more risers. He looked up and saw the lobby was full of them. The wooden bench he’d used to jam the revolving door was in splintery pieces. Their bodies clogged up the door mechanism as they pushed and pulled in random directions but some of them had managed to cram inside.

A hand with fingers like claws slammed down on his shoulder. He’d slid right past the one on the stairs and now it was coming down on top of him.

Adrenaline was the only thing that saved him. He ducked under its biting jaws and threw himself down across the stairs. The drooler tried to grab him up in its arms but he was too fast, kicking his legs out and knocking it right off its feet. It went sprawling, lacking the coordination to even break its fall with its arms. He heard its jaw connect with the tile floor of the lobby, with a sound like a steak hitting a butcher’s block.

The drooler didn’t waste time on feeling pain, though. It got back up, its jaw wobbling inside the slack rubber mask of its face. Black spit had spilled across its nose and one eye but the other one looked right at Tim.

He yanked his revolver out of his pack and fired three shots into it, aiming for its head. Fear threw off his aim and two of the shots went into its neck and chest. The third went straight in through its drool-smeared eye.

The others in the lobby looked up at the roar of the shots. They looked up and right at Tim.

He got his feet under him and ran back up the stairs.