I made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream, lacking the air for it. I stumbled back a step, heart attempting to exit my chest through my throat.
A cat. An enormous, thoroughly unimpressed orange tabby, winding through my legs with the serene confidence of something that owned the building and considered my dramatic entrance mildly interesting at best. It pushed its head firmly against my shin, rubbed the length of its body along my calf, and circled back for another pass without acknowledging my near cardiac event.
“Holy fuck,” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum, standing for a moment. “You scared the shit out of—”
The cat head-butted my ankle.
“Okay,” I said to myself, to the cat, to the general situation. “Okay. Fine.”
I continued to check the building. The cat maintained its orbit around my feet, winding between my steps with practiced ease, its routine apparently unchanged by the end of the world.
A reception desk lined the front wall. A hallway branched off to the right, exam rooms visible through open doors. Cages lined the far wall, all doors hanging open, all clean and empty. In the corner was what appeared to be the cats water and food and a large back tipped over and food all over. Smart cat.
I checked the hallway room by room. The cat padded alongside me with an authority that would have been funny under any other circumstances—pausing when I paused, sitting when I stopped to listen, and watching the corners I watched with an attentiveness that was either genuine or an extremely convincing performance.
I reached the back door, checking through the small window to ensure nothing stood on the other side before unlocking it slowly and deliberately. The mechanism turned without protest.
Keeping my voice low and carrying, I raised my hand toward the Suburban. “It’s good.”
My heart still raced faster than I would have liked. The cat appeared in the gap of the door behind me, sat down in the sliver of light from inside, and regarded me with the calm, evaluating patience of something that had survived considerably worse than this by virtue of not particularly caring about anything it couldn’t eat or sleep on.
Thirty Five
We Have Eyes -Libby
We got him inside.
Barely.
I’d pulled the car right up to the back door, blocking the entrance to offer a bit of protection.
By the time we got the door open wide enough, Finn had gone completely slack—arms hanging, head lolling. All 200-plus pounds of trained soldier reduced to dead weight. We half-carried, half-dragged him down the short hallway and into the back exam room, his boots catching on the floor with every step, the sound too loud in the dense quiet of the building.
“Careful—watch his shoulder,” Fiona said, her voice tight, her hands constantly repositioning to manage the wound even as they moved him.
Getting him onto the table took all three of us and a final, coordinated shove that left us breathing hard. He lay there under the thin beam of our phone flashlights.
“More light,” Fiona said. Her voice had gone flat, efficient, stripped down to its load-bearing parts, as it had been for the past hour. “I need way more than this.”
The overheads were dead, the power long gone with everything else that used to make buildings livable. I swept my light across the reception desk on my way through and grabbed the only thing that presented itself—a small decorative candle sitting beside a stack of pamphlets about heartworm prevention that nobody would ever read again.
“I found this,” I called, my hands shaking so much the lighter took three tries.
The flame caught, steadying into a small, flickering circle that threw more shadow than light, but was enough to work in.
Fiona glanced at it. “It’ll do. Get over here.”
“The car has to be moved first,” I said. “It can’t stay there after dark.”
“Go,” she said, already turning back to Finn, already peeling away the compress with hands that had somehow stayed steady through everything. “Hurry, I’m going to need help.”
I didn’t let myself look at him again on the way out, fixing my gaze on the door, on the floor—anywhere that wasn’t the table and the shape lying on it as blood soaked through everything and kept going.
Outside, the light had dropped faster than I’d accounted for, the sky bleeding from dim gold into a gray-purple that turned the treeline into a solid dark mass and made every ordinary shape into something that required a second look. I moved quickly, loaded my arms with the remaining gear from the back of the Suburban and put it in the clinic, then drove the Suburban deeper into the trees behind the building—angling it carefully, checking the sight line to the road twice before I was satisfied it wouldn’t stick out to anyone passing.
As I headed back to the clinic, I stopped mid-step.
That wet, low, rattling sound in the throat. Air moving through something that had stopped breathing.
