A scratching wakes me first. Not the soothing one of Julien’s hands. A faint scraping sound, like nails on wood.
I blink into darkness, momentarily disoriented. Julien’s gone.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I tense, fully awake now. “Julien?”
A shadow moves, and suddenly, he is by my side, hand covering my mouth. He nods toward the window.
The scratching comes again, more insistent this time, followed by a low whine that raises the hair on my arms. Not human. Definitely not human.
“Get dressed.” His lips brush my ear. “Quietly.”
I slip from the bed, the floor cold beneath my bare feet. My clothes are still damp, hanging by the dead fireplace. Luckily, my underwear is almost dry, and I have shoes. The scratching sound comes again, this time at the door.
Fuck.
I grab Julien’s shirt next. It falls to mid-thigh, better than nothing. Crouching, I move back to Julien’s side and grab my knife from the nightstand.
“What is that?” My voice barely rises above a whisper.
He shakes his head, keeping his body to the side of the frame, carefully pulling back the edge of the curtain to peer outside.
His sharp intake of breath doesn’t reassure me.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
He grabs my wrist, tugging me next to him. “Look. Careful.”
I edge toward the narrow gap in the curtains.
What I see stops my breath.
Moonlight illuminates the clearing outside our cabin, casting everything in silvery blue. Five, no—six figures move across the open space. Zombies, but unlike any I’ve seen before. They move on all fours, backs hunched unnaturally, heads low to the ground. Their movements are wrong. Jerky yet coordinated, almost animal-like. One lifts its head, and I see its face. It has human features stretched and distorted, mouth hanging open to reveal blackened teeth.
“What the fuck,” I whisper. “Are those?—”
“I don’t know.”
One of them approaches our porch, sniffing along the base of the cabin. Its spine juts sharply through torn clothing, legs bent at uncomfortable angles as if broken and reset wrong.
“It’s like they’re hunting,” Julien murmurs.
The realization chills my blood. Regular zombies shamble mindlessly, following sound or movement, but these—they’re tracking something. Us?
A movement across the clearing catches my eye. In the window of the opposite cabin, the one we checked earlier with the sleeping bags, a face appears. A man, maybe mid-thirties, dark hair and beard. He raises his hand, making a sharp cutting motion across his throat, then points down.
“He’s telling us to stay put, get low.” Julien yanks me away from the window.
“He wasn’t here earlier.”
“Must have arrived after us.” Julien guides me toward the center of the room, away from all windows. “He might know more about these things.”
A heavy thud against our porch makes us both freeze. Something scrapes across the wooden boards, followed by sniffing sounds beneath the door. My grip tightens on the knife,knuckles whitening. I force myself to breathe quietly through my nose, counting each inhale.
One. Two. Three.
“Could be the fish they’re smelling,” Julien says.
