She just watched.
Her hand—the one hanging at her side—closed into a fist so tight her knuckles went ivory.
“Fiona,” I said carefully.
“He’s fine.”
“It’s been fou—”
“He’s fine.”
Her voice got super high on the second word. A fracture in all that composure. The first one I’d ever heard from her. It scared me more than the thing that had passed our door.
The siren wailed on.
Relentless.
Screaming into the empty morning, pulling the dead east, buying us time measured in decibels and battery life. How long did a car alarm run? Finn had said five minutes. I didn’t know if that was right. What I knew was the sound—I’d hated it my whole life, the way it burrowed under your skin, made your molars ache, made you want to throw something. I’d complained about it to Finn once, some neighbor’s Jeep going off at midnight, and he’d laughed at me.
My hands had stopped shaking the moment it started.
Now that sound—
It stuttered.
One pulse skipped. Then another. The rhythm hiccupped—shrieked, faltered, shrieked again—like a mechanical heartbeat starting to fail.
I straightened.
Fiona’s head snapped toward me.
Our eyes met.
“No,” I whispered.
“No, no, no—”
“Libby.” Fiona’s voice sharpened.
The alarm stopped.
The silence hit harder than the gunshot had. Vast. Ringing. Total. No siren. No mechanical shriek. Just the low ambient groan of the street, the thud of my own pulse, and the soft, confused sounds of dead things that had just lost the only thing pulling them forward.
They’d stop now.
They’d mill.
They’d scatter.
Some of them would turn around.
And Finn—wherever he stood, however close or far from that Suburban—had just lost his cover.
Lily lifted her head from my shoulder.
“Mom?”
Her voice, trembling.
