Seven pairs of eyes set themselves upon the man who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, standing in a doorway that must have led down below into the building.
Niobe held up a hand and gestured to the others in the group. "You do not want to cross us right now," she insisted darkly, signaling for him to move away from the door and toward nearest outermost section of the roof. "Are you alone? We're searching you." She glanced back briefly at Carl and Jack, who immediately stepped forward to carry out her quick orders. She jogged ahead to the door from where the man had come in from and slammed it shut, in case there were indeed walkers that may have been making their way up to the roof, as he'd said.
"Ten bucks says that was a nuke," James drawled grittily, looking at his watch and staring northward.
Harper folded her arms across her chest, casting him a sidelong glance while facing the newcomer. "I'm not asking because I don't believe you," she started, "but I do want to know why you think it was a nuke. It could have been anything."
"That's right," he sighed resignedly. "What are you, maybe 30? You're too young to have seen old film reels about nuclear annihilation or sat under your desk in a bomb drill." He laughed out loud, mostly to himself. "You don't even know what the Cold War was. Well, maybe this old cat here could relate," he gestured toward the stranger, who cooperated with Carl and Jack in allowing them to search anything he had on him, "but anyway, that blast matched what they said would happen. A big, bright flash. A delayed blast. I learned how to count the distance between me and bombs while I was in Vietnam. Younger than you are, I might add." He turned his head back toward the north. "Don't forget the mushroom cloud. Which, you might recall, we saw. You can still see it, in fact." He gesticulated his hands anxiously toward the aforementioned cloud. "Gets worse and worse..." he muttered, trailing off.
There was a short silence that hung over the group as everyone exchanged glances. Harper pursed her lips and looked around. "Well, if that's the case, then what do we do?" she spelled out, as though detachedly and coldly reviewing their options. "The walkers are heading that way. If what this guy says is true, then this building is saturated with them and we can't go in through the door, there." Harper nodded toward the entrance the stranger had appeared at. Sure enough, the curious warbling of a couple of walkers echoed muffledly from the metal door.
Stevie peered down in the direction that two of the vehicles holding supplies had gone, spying them amidst the throng of undead piling northward, wandering in and around the entrance of the metro tunnel clearly labeled by the crooked signs close by. "There's enough room for almost all of us in those, just down there," she offered, waving and pointing down to the site. "I've got spare keys in my pocket." She shook her jacket by her side, keys jingling to confirm. "It'd be a tight squeeze, but we could do it."
"So, we'd have to go back down the steps," Harper said, turning from Stevie to the iron curling over the ledge connecting to the utility ladder they'd ascended to reach the roof, "back around the building, and get through the street, then pile into the vehicles?"
James shook his head. "I think it's better if we just go back through the building," he disagreed gruffly. "We don't know how much fuel is in those things, and we need to be under a roof, not on top of one." He looked toward the new man, who'd received a relieved nod of approval from both Jack and Carl after an extensive search. "What do you think? And what's your name, anyway?"