The alley wasn’t empty.
It was full.
A wall of them stretched from building face to building face, dozens deep, bodies packed so tightly together they moved as a single organism, heads twitching in unison as the engine noise bounced off the narrow brick walls and reached them. Empty faces swiveling toward the sound, mouths already working.
No gaps. No way through, no way around. We’d driven straight to them.
“Shit,” Fiona whispered from the backseat.
Lily made a sound; she tried to swallow and couldn’t—small, high, and terrified.
Finn didn’t swear. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t waste a single movement on panic.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
The understanding passed between us without a word. There would be no reversing out—the alley entrance had already closed behind us, the edges of the horde folding inward as they turnedand pushed toward the noise. No room to maneuver, no space to swing the nose of the vehicle around, no version of this where we went backward.
We went forward, or we didn’t go at all.
I gave a single firm nod. A single, deliberate drop of my chin.
I turned to the back seat.
“Girls—hold on,” I said, the steadiness in my own voice surprising me.
“Mom—” Lily started.
“Hold on,” I repeated, sharper, a mother’s voice now rather than a frightened woman’s, the kind of tone that doesn’t ask. “Head down, hands braced. Now.”
Fiona’s arm was already across Lily’s chest before I finished speaking.
Finn’s hands tightened on the wheel, knuckles going pale, and I could see the exact moment he committed—the slight forward shift of his weight, the set of his shoulders, the utter elimination of hesitation from his expression. He shifted the SUV into four-wheel drive.
“Alright,” he muttered, more to himself than to any of us. “Here we go.”
He hit the gas.
The Suburban surged forward like something unleashed, and the first impact came an instant later—a body hitting the hood with a concussive, meaty thud that traveled up through the vehicle, the figure rolling up against the windshield before gravity reclaimed it, leaving behind a thick, dark smear that the wipers wouldn’t clear, a wound across our field of vision we’d have to see through for whatever came next.
Lily screamed. A full, unguarded animal sound.
“Keep your heads down!” Fiona snapped, pulling Lily tight against her.
Then more of them—all at once, from every direction. They came from the front and the sides simultaneously, palms slapping the windows before the rest of their bodies caught up, faces slamming against the glass with a solid, terrible percussion—eyes vacant and absolute, mouths slack, teeth snapping against the surface in a reflex that had nothing behind it, nothing driving it but the most basic and degraded remnant of what they’d once been.
The sounds.
God, the sounds.
The crack of bones meeting the undercarriage. The wet, grinding resistance as the tires found purchase over things that yielded in ways they shouldn’t, the Suburban jolting and rocking as Finn pushed it forward through a terrain it had never been designed to navigate. The smearing drag of hands across glass that left streaks of dark matter behind them. The specific, nauseating sound of something getting caught in the wheel well and then releasing—a snap that I knew I’d hear again in the dark for a long time.
“Don’t stop!” I yelled, my voice raw and louder than I’d intended.
“I’m not!” Finn shot back, clipped and tight, every fragment of his attention narrowed to the fifteen feet of forward progress he could see through the blood-smeared windshield.
A body hit the passenger side with enough force to rock us sideways, a palm dragging a long red streak across my window before the wheel took it, and I pressed myself toward the center console instinctively, every nerve in my body screaming at the proximity of the glass between me and what pressed against it.
