The alley seemed to go on forever. Seemed to extend itself with every yard we covered, the mass of them replenishing from somewhere deeper in the dark ahead, more of them pressing infrom the edges where the buildings created shadows we couldn’t see into properly.
A figure caught on the front bumper and held for several long, unbearable seconds—dragged forward, bouncing against the hood—before the vehicle’s momentum finally tore it free with a sound I immediately and desperately wanted to unhear.
“Jesus—” Fiona whispered, the word barely a breath.
The mass began to thin. Incrementally, fractionally, then all at once.
Finn didn’t lift his foot. Didn’t offer a single concession to the ones still in our path—just pushed harder, the engine opening up as resistance fell away, the Suburban accelerating through the final press of bodies with a series of impacts that diminished in force and frequency until there were none.
And then we were through.
The alley opened onto the side street, and the silence hit like something solid. Just the engine. The wipers dragged uselessly across the windshield. The four of us breathing.
I turned and looked through the rear window.
They were still there. The entire mass of them, reorganizing slowly at the alley mouth, drawn by the sound we were already moving away from us already too far behind us to reach.
“We made it,” Lily whispered.
I reached back without turning fully around and found her hand and held it, pressed her fingers hard between mine, and felt her grip tighten back immediately.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, facing forward, watching the open street ahead of us. “We did.”
Thirty Two
Got Anything Against Rabbit? -Finn
We hit the off-ramp and—somehow—got lucky.
The road opened up, not much, but enough. The city fell away behind us. Debris littered the shoulder, things I didn’t look at too closely. But the lanes ahead were clear, and for the first time since we’d left the house, we were actually moving.
Cars lined both shoulders—some pulled halfway over as if the decision to stop had simply expired, others kissing at odd angles, the result of one driver braking and another not reacting in time. Doors hung open. A suitcase. A child’s backpack. A paper coffee cup still sat in the cupholder of a sedan , as if its owner had just stepped out to check something and would be right back.
They hadn’t come back.
I tightened my grip on the wheel and kept my eyes on the road ahead.
“We’re going to need gas,” I said, scanning the horizon, running the math automatically. “As soon as we get a little further out, we start looking for something we can siphon from.”
Libby shifted in the passenger seat, still pale but present, still holding herself together with whatever she’d been using since this morning. “That’s what the garden hose in the back is for?”
“Yeah.”
Something moved across her face—not quite a laugh, but in the neighborhood of one. “I thought it was for a garden,” she said. “I didn’t want to ask.”
“Tomatoes on I-95,” I said. “Classic.”
From the backseat, Lily made a sound that couldn’t decide what it was—somewhere between a sob and a giggle, shaky and thin, but real.
“Honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t even question it,” she said.
“Add it to the list,” Fiona muttered from beside her, head tipped back against the seat, eyes closed for exactly three seconds before opening again. “Step one: survive the apocalypse. Step two: establish roadside agriculture.”
The city continued to thin behind us, buildings giving way to stretches of treeline and open land. The air even looked different out here—less choked, less orange-tinged from whatever had been burning back in the city.
Not safe. But better. Measurably, undeniably better.
“Can you grab the map?” I said, holding my right hand out.
