A few comfortable miles passed before Fiona leaned forward between the seats.
“We just crossed into Maine.”
I looked up in time to catch the sign blurring past. The tight coil behind my sternum loosened, just slightly. Not relief—not yet—but something.
Finn’s fingers tapped faster against the gearshift.
“We need gas soon. We won’t make the marina on what’s left in the tank.”
“There,” I said, pointing. A sedan was nosed into the ditch, its back end still on the shoulder. The driver’s side door was ajar, but the windows were intact. It was a risk, but our only option.
He pulled up ahead of it, leaving the engine running. “Fast,” he said, handing me the red plastic gas can from behind his seat. “Don’t get comfortable.”
I was already reaching for the siphon hose coiled beside it.
We stepped out together into the gray morning air, and I noticed it immediately—a stillness that held no peace. No birds.No ambient noise. Just the low tick of our engine cooling and the sound of my boots on the asphalt.
Finn moved between me and the road without being asked, weapon drawn, eyes sweeping constantly across the road, the treeline, the ditch.
I crouched beside the abandoned car, opened the gas cap, and fed the hose into the tank with hands that knew the procedure by now.I worked the siphon with clumsy hands.
“Come on,” I breathed. “Come on, come on—”
The gas began moving through the hose in a thin, acrid stream, the smell hitting the back of my throat immediately.
“Okay—good—nearly there,”
Something moved to my left.
Fast—not the stumbling drag I’d learned to listen for, but something explosive, registering in the body before the brain. No shuffle, no warning—just violent motion at the edge of my vision and then Finn’s voice cracking through the silence—
“Libby—!”
I turned.
Too late.
It hit me with the full weight of a grown man, taking me straight down. The hose ripped free, splashing gas across my forearm and face. My shoulders took the impact instead of my head by an inch. The air left my lungs and wouldn’t come back.
Then the weight of it settled onto me, and the real terror hit.
Up close, it was so much worse than distance ever prepared me for. It had been a man—middle-aged, heavyset, still wearing a reflective work vest over a flannel shirt, the kind of clothing that suggested he’d been on his way somewhere ordinary when everything stopped being ordinary. The skin of his face had gone the deep gray-brown of old bruising everywhere, splitting at the cheekbones and along the jaw where the tissue had dried and contracted, pulling his expression into something permanentand empty. One eye had clouded to a flat, opaque white. The other had ruptured at some point—a dark, collapsed cavity weeping a thin black discharge down the side of his face that had dried into a long streak reaching his collar.
His mouth opened above mine, and the smell that came out of it hit me like a physical thing—decay and something sweetly, horrifyingly wrong.
“No!” I jammed both forearms up against his chest, palms flat, locking my elbows to keep his face from dropping any further toward mine. My arms shook with the effort. The angle gave me nothing—pinned flat to the tarmac, no leverage, the road surface offering no purchase for my boots as I tried to twist out from under his weight.
His fingers found my shoulder and dug in with a grip that had no restraint in it, no calibration—just pressure.
“Finn—!”
The weight vanished.
As he ripped the thing away, his sidearm, knocked from its holster in the struggle, clattered to the pavement. It skittered across the asphalt as I rolled clear, gasping, hauling air back into my lungs in ragged pulls that burned all the way down.
I scrambled to my knees, my legs shaking too badly to stand.
The thing had found its footing.
