“Collapsed twenty minutes later,” Fiona whispered. She started to breathe heavily, her struggle for composure visible. “Then… she opened her eyes and attacked. Bit through one of their cheeks. Tore another one’s ear off with her teeth.”
Outside the door, something let out a long, choking groan that rose in pitch and faded into silence.
Fiona’s fingers tightened on my arm.
I looked at her for a long moment without speaking.
My youngest sibling. Graduated college at nineteen, med school at twenty-three—while the rest of us stumbled through life pretending we had a plan.
I’d driven down from Maine yesterday morning for her birthday. We’d had dinner on Salem Street—candles jammed into wine bottles, a server who kept calling herdottoressano matter how many times she corrected him. She’d laughed so hard she snorted into her wine.
Twelve hours between birthday candles and the start of whatever thefuckthis was.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
She looked back at me. Something shifted in her face—not the doctor—only Fiona, the way she’d looked at me across the backseat on long car trips when we were kids, the two of us watching the same thing out the window without pointing it out, not needing to.
“You’re insane,” she hissed. “Crossing the city on foot. For me.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “Runs in the family.”
Thud.
Fiona’s expression crumbled at the edges.
“Finn,” she breathed. “What are those things?”
I glanced toward the door, the slow, persistent scrape moving across its surface with no urgency and no intention of stopping.
“I don’t know.”
I drew my gun, my hands moving through the motions without a thought—drop the magazine, check the round count, seat it back in, rack the slide. A decade of muscle memory that no amount of civilian life had touched.
“But we don’t want to be here when more of them findthisdoor.”
I looked back at her.
“Four blocks?”
She nodded.
The corner of my mouth pulled up.
“Then let’s go home.”
“How?” Fiona asked.
I pushed myself to my feet and crossed to an electronic panel on the far wall. The plastic casing was cracked, a schematic of the garage underneath hazy with age. I traced the faded lines, trying to make sense of the layout. Most of the grid was dead, but I could just make out our position—level one, north side—and an exit ramp. Then my eyes caught it: three floors up, on the opposite corner, a single green light blinked next to a fire alarm icon. It was the farthest point from us.
“They follow sound,” I said.
Fiona stepped up beside me, her eyes following my finger on the panel. “A diversion. You’re going to draw them away.”
I pressed the button.
Half a second of nothing.
