The Suburban sat below, three houses down. Forty yards. Maybe fifty.
So close. And too damn far.
I ran through it one more time.
Shoot the window. Alarm triggers. Every dead thing on the block turns toward the sound. While they converge, I’m already off the roof—down the hall, through the neighbor’s yard, coming at the Suburban from the opposite direction.
Libby said the keys should be under the front tire.
She’d better be right.
Because I sure as hell didn’t have time to hotwire a car with a street full of things that could smell living blood from a hundred yards out. I’d watched one work a man’s jaw loose from his skull—methodical, almost patient, the way you’d separate a drumstick from the joint. The man had kept making sounds afterward. Wet, shapeless gurgles.
No, I needed nothing to go wrong.
I pressed my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth.
Not helpful.
Not now.
Adrenaline hit—that old familiar edge. My mouth went dry and my hands felt too light. Heart rate up but steady, the way it always got before an op. The fear was there too, coiled cold in my gut, but training had taught me what to do with fear. You don’t kill it. You use it.
I knew how to do this.
I’d trained for rooms full of hostiles, blown-out buildings, midnight raids where the difference between living and dying came down to a quarter-second trigger pull.
But not like this.
Never like this.
Not with three people downstairs who couldn’t shoot back, who couldn’t run fast enough, who I’d die for without thinking—and that terrified me more than anything shambling through those streets below.
Not with her.
I turned away from the edge.
Libby stood three feet behind me.
She hadn’t gone downstairs yet.
She just stood there, watching me. The early light catching the side of her face, painting half gold and leaving the other half in shadow. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyes held something so raw.
She’d come back up.
Or maybe she’d never left.
I didn’t think.
Two steps and my hand slid behind her neck, fingers threading into her hair, pulling her into me. My other arm wrapped around her waist—tight, almost too tight—as if I needed to confirm she existed. That she had weight and warmth and substance. That this wasn’t some fever dream I’d crafted to survive the end of the world.
I kissed her.
Hard.
This had nothing careful to it.
My mouth found hers and took—urgent, almost bruising—and the sound she made against my lips, a small, broken noise caught between a gasp and a sob—nearly undid me.
