“No,” Fiona said, the word cutting through the fear in the car, leaving no room for argument. “He is not.”
I held onto that. Wrapped both hands around it and drove.
We kept moving. The light shifted from the flat gold of late afternoon into something longer and lower, shadows stretching across the road at angles that meant we had less time than I wanted. Every building we passed was assessed and dismissed—a farmhouse with no visible supplies, a gas station already stripped, a hardware store that might have had something useful in another life.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The town materialized from the treeline, a place so small that Main Street took only thirty seconds to drive from end to end. My eyes scanned every storefront, every sign, every building.
“Come on,” I muttered. “Come on, give me something—”
And there it was.
A small building set slightly back from the road, with a sign above the door. A painted paw print in the corner.
“Vet clinic,” I said.
Fiona leaned forward from the backseat, her hands still pressing on Finn’s shoulder. She looked at it for exactly one second.
“That works,” she said. “It has to.”
I turned off the main road without slowing much and circled behind the building, tucking the Suburban between a fence and a dense stand of trees at the back corner of the lot, hiding it from view.
“If anyone from that bridge followed us,” I said, half to myself.
“Then we don’t want to be visible from the road,” Fiona finished, her gaze already fixed on Finn, assessing how much time we had before the situation changed in a direction that offered no correction.
I killed the engine.
My gaze swept the perimeter—the darkened windows of the clinic, the deep shadows pooling near the fence line, the empty stretch of road behind us. No movement. No sound but the ticking of the cooling engine.
I turned in my seat and looked at him.
He was pale, a grayness beneath the pallor. Blood had soaked through Fiona’s improvised compress and found new pathways, tracking across the leather of the seat in dark lines.
I reached back and put my hand against his face for just a moment. Cold. Too cold.
I picked up his gun from the center console. Checked the magazine. Chambered a round. My father’s voice surfaced—patient, Sunday-morning, slightly bored—talking me throughthe same sequence on a range I’d spent years resenting. I hadn’t thanked him for it then. I couldn’t now.
“Stay with him,” I said. “Both of you. Don’t open the doors for anything.”
“Be careful,” Fiona said, the two words carrying everything she didn’t have time to say.
I pushed the door open and stepped out into the evening, easing it shut behind me with barely a sound, the latch catching softly. The air outside had dropped several degrees since we’d last stopped—still and cold.
I advanced on the clinic with the gun up, shoulders close to the wall, eyes tracking across every window, every shadow, every place the remaining light didn’t reach. Somewhere in the last several hours, I had apparently used up the part of me capable of fear, because my hands were steady and my breathing was even, and I kept moving.
Because if something waited inside that building, we had no alternative to offer. No backup option. No other doors to try.
Finn was bleeding out in the Suburban’s backseat, and this building was the only thing standing between him and a thought I refused to finish.
I moved along the back of the building, shoulder close to the wall, gun up, breath measured and slow, eyes tracking every shadow the fading light threw across the ground. I didn’t allow myself the luxury of considering what would happen if the door opened onto something we couldn’t handle.
The sign on the back door caught my attention first.
CLOSED—VACATION
And beneath it, handwritten in black marker, a date range: the same week everything had come apart. The same week the world had stopped being the world and become whatever this was instead.
