The man’s jaw dripped, chin dark and slick. He bent down and wrenched his head sideways, tearing something loose—a long strip of tissue that stretched and snapped between his teeth. He swallowed hard and dove straight back in. The body beneath him didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. It simply yielded.
They weren’t helping anyone. They were feeding.
The realization arrived in pieces, each adding to the horror. My vision tunneled. The handgun was up before I realized I’d drawn it, the sight already settling on the nearest head. For a long, suspended moment, I held it there, my finger resting against the trigger, not yet pressing, because some stubborn part of me was still waiting for one of them to stand up and explain themselves. To turn around and be a person. The wet sounds continued, patient and indifferent, and my finger tightened a degree.
Then I stopped myself.
I forced air into my lungs. Slow. Controlled. The same deliberate breath I’d used a hundred times before in places that had no business being on any map.
My brain ran its checklist without being asked—rounds in the magazine, distance, angles, exit route. Even if I dropped one or two before they reacted, the rest would run toward me before I cleared the street. Gunfire echoed hard in urban centers. No idea how many more between here and the parking garage. Limited ammunition. No backup.
The wet sounds continued behind me.
Fiona. Still out there. Waiting for me to show up.
She came first. Everything else, second.
I lowered the muzzle. My arms shook with the effort, every nerve screaming at me to raise it back up, to empty the magazine into those hunched and feeding backs; to make the wet sounds stop.
I held the gun at my side and eased backward.
One of the figures raised its head.
A woman with dark hair hung in matted patches across her face. Below her nose, thick, almost black blood coated everything. Pale flesh swung from her lower lip, and she chewed once, slow and mechanical, before it disappeared. Through the curtain of hair, her eyes stared out, irises swallowed almost entirely by pupil—just dark, wet circles in a slack face.
Then her head tilted, the way an animal’s does when a sound reaches it from a long way off.
For a singlelongsecond, those dead eyes found mine.
My chest seized, and I didn’t breathe. Didn’t dare blink. I eased my foot backward, set it down softly, shifted my weight forward, and drew the other foot back with the kind of deliberate care that had kept me alive in the past.
Carefully.
Quiet.
Don’t—
A woman ran screaming from a house further down the street.
All four heads snapped up, mouths open, slick faces turning toward the noise in unison—the same blank, predatory focus. One rose to its feet, strings of gore stretching and snapping between its fingers and the open cavity below.
I didn’t wait.
I turned and moved quickly down the sidewalk—not running yet, but eating up ground in long, controlled strides, my pulse hammering against my ribs, my fingers wrapped tight around the grip of the gun. The streets of Boston looked like the opening act of a horror film, and whatever had started it showed no sign of slowing down.
* * *
Almost there.
I reached the parking garage faster than expected, lungs burning, each breath dragging hot and raw through my throat.
The entrance gate had stopped halfway down—some emergency protocol the hospital had managed to trip before everything fell apart. I ducked under it and kept moving.
The garage stretched ahead, dim and cavernous, fluorescent tubes guttering sick yellow light across rows of cars.
I slowed. Every footstep came back doubled off the concrete, every shift of my jacket too loud.
A garage map hung bolted to a pillar halfway up the first level. I swept the shadows behind me before I read it.
