Too many. Way too many.
I backed up, gun raised, scanning the shadows as the woman in scrubs lurched closer. She opened her mouth, and a shrill, broken shriek ripped out of her—high and jagged, scraping along every nerve in my spine.
Ten feet.
Eight.
I fired.
The round caught her just above the left eye. Her head snapped back, her feet left the ground. She came down mid-stride, legs tangling under her, and the momentum carried her forward across the slick concrete until she stopped against my boot with a soft, wet sound.
The others didn’t flinch. They didn’t register her dropping for even a fraction of a second. They simply kept coming—guttural sounds spilling from throats that should have gone silent hours ago.
I pivoted and fired again.
The teenager’s head came apart. The round entered through the forehead, and the exit wound opened the back of his skull, spraying red and gray across the windshield of a nearby sedan in a dripping pattern. His body dropped straight down, knees buckling, hitting the concrete in a heap.
Three down. More coming.
They crawled out from between vehicles now—hands over bumpers, bodies dragging from under cars. One slipped in the blood pool and slammed face-first into the concrete, nose crushing flat. It didn’t pause. It just started clawing forward on broken fingers, raw tips leaving thin red trails behind it.
My pulse was loud enough in my ears that I had to concentrate to hear past it.
Not here. Not now.
Fiona.
I backed toward the north wall, eyes sweeping the dark—more emerging from the upper ramp—searching for the security office while I counted rounds and distance and the narrowing gap between me and everything converging on my position.
One of them lunged from behind a pickup truck.
No warning, no building groan—just a sudden impact. Hands slammed into my chest, lifting my feet off the ground and driving my backward into a parked car with enough force to dent the metal. The air exploded from my lungs, and the gun nearly flew from my grasp. Only pure adrenaline kept my fingers locked around it.
Its face filled my vision, inches away. Skin hung loose from its cheekbones, peeling back in gray, papery sheets. Teeth, slick with blackened blood, parted and snapped toward my throat with mechanical, relentless force. The clack of its jaws slamming shut echoed deep in my skull.
Then the smell hit me, stopping me cold: sweet and putrid, the cloying stench of tissue breaking down from the inside.
It lunged again, teeth grazing the skin of my neck—close enough to hear enamel scrape against stubble.
I jammed my forearm under its chin, driving its head back hard. Its mouth continued to work against the pressure—snapping, snapping, snapping—as dark saliva soaked through my sleeve, warm against my skin.
I set my jaw and kept moving.
I brought the gun up, shoved the muzzle into the soft tissue beneath its chin, angled the barrel toward the brain stem, and pulled the trigger.
The blast took the top of its skull off. Every muscle released at once, and its full dead weight dropped onto my chest, driving me backward against the dented car door.
Half a second of near-silence. Just the high ringing in my ears and the warm, wet weight pinning me against crumpled metal.
Then the groans surged back. Closer. Louder.
I shoved the corpse off me and staggered upright, my boots sliding in the blood pooling beneath it. More shapes emerged from between cars, dragging across the concrete toward me.
I backed toward the north wall, scanning for the door, pulling air that tasted like iron and gunpowder into my lungs.
“FIONA!”
My voice tore out, raw and desperate, bouncing off every wall and pillar in the garage, carrying through the structure and returning to me in broken pieces.
