The knot in my stomach pulled tighter. “What’s going on?”
He looked at me. His eyes moved to the window behind him and held there for a second too long before coming back.
“See for yourself,” he said quietly.
The room fell still. I sensed Sloane go rigid beside me. Jason stopped shifting.
I crossed the room, each step heavier than the last. The office was maybe fifteen feet wide, but it seemed much longer.
My fingers touched the cold metal of the blinds.
I pulled them aside.
Outside, the world had come apart.
Cars appeared stopped at weird angles across the road, some with doors still hanging open, engines still running. A minivan had jumped the curb and sat with its front end buried in a bus stop bench. Broken glass glittered across the asphalt.
People running. Some had their mouths open—screaming, probably, though I couldn’t hear them through the glass. Others ran with their heads down, not looking, just moving, simply trying to get away. A woman in a business suitsprinting barefoot across the median, one heel still in her hand, the other gone.
In the center of the road, a figure moved strangely.
That was the only way to describe it. He moved strange. His head jerked to one side, quickly shifting to the other, in sharp, stuttering snaps that no conscious person would make. His arms hung loose, but his fingers twitched and curled. He walked, but it wasn’t walking—more like lurching, staggering, his legs bending at angles that looked like they hurt, like something inhabited his body and hadn’t figured out how it worked yet.
Someone running past clipped his shoulder, stumbled, kept going, didn’t look back.
The figure turned toward the contact. Slowly. His head tilted. Then he started moving after them, faster than before.
I watched a man try to get back into his car. He appeared to be fumbling with his keys, dropping them and picking them up. His hands likely trembled so intensely that he was unable to insert the key into the lock. Behind him, two more of those figures rounded the corner of a building. They were coated in a dark, damp substance. One of them had its mouth open, and I observed, even from this distance, even through the glass, that its teeth were red.
The man got the door open. Got inside. I don’t know if he drove away. I stopped watching.
In the distance, sirens wailed. Not one or two. Dozens. Layered on top of each other, overlapping, rising and falling out of sync until it became one continuous, churning sound that didn’t stop. It just kept building.
Smoke rose from somewhere to the east. A thick blackcolumn of it, climbing straight up into the pale sky.
I sensed it then.
That same feeling from this morning. That heaviness. That weird feeling that had been sitting in my chest all day, pressing down, waiting.
But it wasn’t small anymore.
It filled every part of me; I let the blinds fall closed.
I turned back slowly.
“What the hell is happening?”
The director swallowed. I watched his throat work. His hands were flat on the desk, and I realized it was because they were shaking and he didn’t want us to see.
“The government issued an emergency alert,” he said. His voice was steady, but it cost him. I detected the effort behind every word. “Shelter in place. Effective immediately.”
The words sat in the room. Nobody moved.
Jason shifted beside me. The sound of him breathing too fast through his nose.
“They want everyone off the streets,” the director continued. He paused. Swallowed again. “Everyone home.”
Home.