The door at the far end of the north wall rattled hard on its frame.
A voice from the other side. Muffled. Shaking.
“Finn?!”
“Open the door!” I shouted, already moving. Behind me—close, too close—the shuffle of dead feet picked up speed. One shrieked, a high, shattered sound that bypassed training and discipline, finding something older. A spike of cold drove down my spine.
The door jerked open just as I reached it.
Fiona’s face—pale, tear-streaked—flashed in front of me for half a second before I lunged through the opening, spun on my heels, and threw my full weight against the door.
“Shut it!”
She threw herself against it beside me without hesitation.
Something hit the other side before the latch caught. The impact traveled through the steel and into my back—a deep, shuddering clang that rattled the door and rang through the small room. Fiona scrambled for the deadbolt, her fingers, slick with sweat and shaking too hard to find purchase, slipped off the mechanism.
“Come on—come on.”
The bolt slid home with a heavy click.
I grabbed the security bar mounted beside the frame—thick steel, industrial grade—and dropped it into the brackets. It seated with a solid, final thud that I let myself believe in for exactly a single second.
Another impact rocked the door. Then another. Then another.
Each blow rang through the small office, the metal flexing just enough to see. Between the hits, a guttural, mindless snarling seeped through the cracks, followed by the long, slow scrape of fingernails dragging down steel.
Just clawing. The way something claws at a barrier to reach what it can smell on the other side.
My legs gave out.
I slid down the door until I hit the floor, the cold steel pressing and vibrating against my back with every impact, my gun clattering against the concrete beside me. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I stared at them—the blood drying in the creases of my knuckles, my fingers curling and uncurling around nothing—and couldn’t make them stop.
Fiona stood a few feet away pressed against the desk, her arms wrapped tight around herself, staring at me. For a long moment she didn’t move, her eyes searching my face as though she needed to confirm I existed—that I’d actually come through that door, that the blood soaking my sleeve belonged to something else, that she hadn’t constructed this out of desperation and fear behind a locked door in the dark.
Then her face crumpled.
She crossed the space between us in two steps and fell against my chest, fingers twisting into my jacket and pulling as if she needed the resistance to confirm I was real. I pulled her in, pressed a hand to the back of her head, and held her there as tremors ran through her. The sounds that came out of her weren’t quite crying.
“I’ve got you,” I said quietly. My voice came out rougher than I intended. “I’ve got you.”
BANG.
The door jumped in its frame, and Fiona flinched so hard against me her teeth clicked together. A fresh wave of pounding started up—not a single set of hands now, but several. Between the impacts came the scraping. And beneath that, a new sound: teeth against steel, jaws working at the barrier with the same mechanical patience as everything else out there.
The door groaned. The frame held—solid steel bolted into reinforced concrete—but the sound of them working at it, that relentless and mindless scratching and gnashing, settled under my skin and stayed there.
Fiona pressed her face harder into my shoulder, her breath coming hot and ragged through the fabric.
“They wereeatingpeople,” she whispered, her voice scraped hollow. “Finn, they were actually—I watched them pull a man apart in the stairwell. He screamed for so long, and then he just stopped. And then he got up and—”
“I know.” I tightened my arm around her. “I know.”
Another thud rattled the door. A long, gurgling moan rose in pitch on the other side before fading into wet clicking. Then, silence settled over us—just the two of us on the floor of a ten-by-ten security office, listening to the dead claw at the steel between us and them.
Her grip on my jacket tightened, knuckles digging into my ribs.
“I thought I’d die in here,” she said quietly, almost matter-of-factly—the way people state things they’ve already accepted. “Alone. Behind a locked door. Just… listening to them.”
