Tim slammed the office door shut behind him, twisted the deadbolt. Backed up until his legs hit the desk behind him. He could hear the droolers coming up the stairs. They couldn’t climb fences but a simple staircase was still within the limit of their powers, it seemed. Before he’d even caught his breath they were pounding on the door. He could see one through the rectangle of glass set into the door, its face pale and patchy, broken with sores. It felt a film of black drool on the window as it pressed its mouth against the glass, its lips making an obscene seal there. He could see its blackened tongue lolling for him.

He raised the revolver, intending to shoot through the little window, then stopped himself. He reached up with his left hand and gently tugged his right arm down until the gun wasn’t pointing at the door anymore.

“Do better,” he told himself. “Use your fucking brain.”

He was still a long way from Seward Park. If he used all his bullets now he would be defenseless until he found Nero—and then, how would he kill Nero, would he club him to death with an empty revolver? He would need another weapon. Something he could find in the office.

The baseball bat on the desk was mounted on a pair of brass stands that he unscrewed easily. The bat was heavy but it felt good in his hand, well-balanced. Tim hadn’t swung a bat since little league but he supposed he remembered how.

That was a nice start, he congratulated himself, but it didn’t solve much. Opening the door seemed unwise. Not with so many droolers out there. He might break a few heads before one of them got close enough to bite him but that would be pointless. It wouldn’t get him justice for Karen and Jake.

He would have to leave the office another way. A harder way.

Striding up to the windows he took a stance and then made a few practice swings. He needed to be careful—if he hit the glass at the wrong angle it could splash back on him. He’d read about the dangers of broken glass, and he knew that glass in real life was nothing like the stuff people jumped through in the movies. As soon as he shattered the window he thought it was going to splash into a trillion tiny flying daggers, any of which could cut him badly enough to make him bleed out. He didn’t have anything clean he could use as a bandage, so he hoped to avoid that.

One, two, three—he swung, hard, and the bat slammed into the surface of the window, hard enough to send thrumming vibrations up his arms. The glass splintered and shook and grew cobwebs of cracks that ran instantly outward from the point of impact, filling the pane and turning it almost opaque. The window held, however, other than a few chips of glass that flew outward and spun down to hit the cars below.

Tim shook out his hands and studied the window. Was it made of some weird tempered glass, some shock-resistant stuff? He moved closer, got his face right up near the window. That was when he heard the noise. A noise like ice crackling on impact as it fell into a glass of warm tea. It was a tiny, chiming noise, repeated over and over, hundreds of times a second.

“Shit,” he yelled, and jumped back, just as the entire pane of glass let go at once and fell like a sharp waterfall to the floor. Most of it fell out, through the window frame, but some large jagged spikes fell inward to crash around his feet. Cool, fresh air rushed into the office and ruffled his hair. Stepping forward he put his head through the new opening and looked down.

The droolers looked up at him with no curiosity in their faces, nothing at all in their eyes. One, who had been standing closest to the building, had been showered by the falling glass and had a shard sticking out of his cheek. A little dark blood wept from the cut but the drooler didn’t seem to mind at all.

A military transport truck stood about six feet out from the window, its canvas top only a few feet down from where Tim stood. If he took a running jump he could land right on it, then scramble down the side to the street level. That was exactly where he needed to be. There was one problem, of course. There were droolers all around the truck. He needed to distract them somehow. Even just for a few seconds—that might be enough time.

Tim looked at the baseballs mounted on plaques on the walls. They were glued down and he couldn’t pull them off their wooden mountings. The bat did a good job of separating them, though. He picked up a couple, warmed up his arm. He took aim and pegged one of the droolers right in the head. Tim was no baseball player, he doubted the ball left his hand at more than thirty or forty miles an hour. Still it was enough to knock the drooler off his feet. The others turned to look, for the first time their eyes moving away from Tim. He got ready to make his leap—then stopped. The droolers had all turned to look back up at him. The one on the ground slowly got back up on his feet.

He was beginning to understand that they didn’t feel pain. Beyond that—without frontal lobes to speak of, they were incapable of anything but the lowest animal curiosity. He thought about what Helena had told him. About stereotyped behaviors. About creatures that responded the same way every time to a given stimulus.

He looked around the office, desperate for some new plan. Then he saw exactly what he needed and he laughed out loud.