Two security offices. One here the other on the north side.
The closest had its door cracked. I nudged it wider with my boot.
Small room. Two dead monitors. A chair tipped on its side. Coffee pooled across the desk, dripping off the edge in a slow patter, uncomfortably close to a pulse.
Empty.
She had to be in the North office.
I kept moving. The silence thickened as I pushed deeper—no ventilation hum, nothing but boot scuffs and my own pulse.
I rounded the final corner and froze.
Thirty feet away, between two parked sedans, stood a man.
His button-down shirt had gone almost black, plastered wet to a torso hitching with shallow spasms. Its right sleeve ended at the elbow—below it, a bite had torn the forearm to the bone, the wound edges oozing something too dark and too slow.
His face.
The skin was the color of old candle wax, gray-yellow and tight, stretched so taut over his cheekbones that the flesh between them had collapsed into graying trenches. Dried blood crusted black around his mouth, cracking at the corners wherehis lips twitched—small, rhythmic flinches, like a sleeping dog, except there was no dream behind them.
And his eyes.
Milky, clouded over with a film like the skin that forms on cooling fat. The light from the guttering fluorescentes caught it and threw nothing back—just a dull, wet opacity where a person’s eyes should have been. Not blind; worse than blind. They moved in quick, twitching arcs across the garage, each sweep too fast, too mechanical, like a security camera stuck on a short loop, scanning, hunting, finding nothing and starting over.
A sound crawled from his throat, ragged and caught somewhere between a growl and a breath, like air being forced through a windpipe full of blood.
One leg popped when he shifted his weight, the ankle bent at a wrong angle—and then he took another step on it, and another, the joint clicking with each one, the foot dragging a half-beat behind the rest of him. His eyes kept moving. Kept sweeping.
Still hunting.
I raised the handgun slowly, the front sight trembling no matter how hard I locked my wrists. The thing’s head shifted to one side—tilted—listening, and then those dead, milky eyes found me across thirty feet of concrete, focused, locking on with a recognition that had nothing human left in it.
Its mouth opened wider than a jaw should stretch, tendons popping along the hinge. It screamed—or something like a scream—the sound bouncing off every concrete surface in the garage, carrying up through the levels like a signal.
My finger squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot was a physical blow in the enclosed space, leaving only a sharp, high ring in its wake. The bullet exploded through the side of its skull and blew out the opposite temple in a spray of dark blood and bone that spattered across the hood of the car behind it. The head snapped sideways, and the bodystood for what seemed like an impossible second, swaying, jaw still hanging open.
Then it folded and hit the concrete with a heavy, meaty slap.
The echo rolled through the garage and kept going.
A door slammed somewhere above, followed by another. Feet scraped against concrete in long, uneven drags. Something heavy toppled off a hood with a hollow metallic boom. From the ramp to the upper level came a sound like wet fabric being pulled across asphalt, growing louder.
Shit.
To my left, someone slapped the hood of a sedan. A figure staggered out from between two SUVs—a woman in hospital scrubs, soaked through and dripping. The right side of her neck was gone, a fist-sized chunk torn away down to the vertebrae, the carotid artery a severed stump leaking dark fluid down her collarbone.
She didn’t notice. Didn’t slow.
Her head jerked toward me, eyes wide and filmed over, and she started moving—not running, but a lurching stride that closed the distance faster than anything with that much damage had any right to manage.
Another emerged behind her, followed by another.
A man in a charcoal business suit, the lower half of his face gone—jaw ripped free, tongue swinging loose with each step. Behind him, a teenager, both arms cratered shoulder to wrist, tendons glistening where the skin had been stripped away.
My brain ran the numbers.
