She was already getting up.
Her body jerked upright in a series of sharp, mechanical movements—spine snapping straight, legs folding beneath her, hands pressing flat against the ground. Her left arm bent at an angle that meant it was broken, the forearm bowing outward where no joint existed. She put weight on it anyway. I watched the bone shift beneath the skin, a visible bulgepressing outward, and she pushed herself to her feet, as if pain didn’t exist for her.
She stood in the middle of the lot, blood-soaked, broken, her head still wrenched to one side.
She appeared to be looking at us.
Then she started running.
* * *
I collapsed back into the seat, my chest heaving. The seatbelt cut into my collarbone where I’d been thrown against it, and I didn’t care. We were moving, and she was behind us, and we were away from her, away from whatever the fuck that thing had been.
My hands trembled violently in my lap. I watched them shake. My fingers kept spasming, curling and uncurling as if they belonged to someone else. The truck roared beneath us, and I held onto that sensation because it was real. It was normal and real.
For a second, I let myself believe we were safe.
Then Callan’s foot came off the gas.
The truck began to slow down.
No.
No, no, no.
I looked up.
The entrance to the lot was blocked.
A car lay flipped on its side across the exit, its undercarriage exposed and dripping fluid—oil, coolant, something darker—onto the pavement. One of its doors hung open at an angle that meant the hinges had been ripped apart, notbent. Broken glass covered the road in a wide, glittering spray that caught our headlights and threw them back in sharp little points of light. Beyond the glass, drag marks were visible—long, dark smears leading away from the driver’s side window. Whoever had been inside that car had been pulled out.
And around it—
Movement.
Three.
No.
Four.
Four figures standing in the wash of our headlights. Their bodies were still at first, almost frozen, caught mid-motion as if someone had pressed pause. Their shadows stretched long and black across the pavement behind them.
Then they turned toward us.
All four at the same time, heads swiveling with that same odd, mechanical precision I’d seen in the woman, coordinated in a way that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl.
They looked like her. All of them—off and disfigured in the same ways. Blood-soaked faces, hands, clothes so saturated they’d gone black. One of them, a man, dragged his left leg behind him with each step, his foot twisted completely backward at the ankle, toes pointing the wrong direction, the bone visibly tenting the skin on the front of his shin. It didn’t slow him down. He just dragged it, scraping across the pavement with that same sickening rhythm.
Another—a woman, maybe; it was hard to tell—had its jaw hanging open, not slack but dislocated. It hung too low, stretching the skin of its cheeks into a grotesque, elongatedgape that exposed the full length of its teeth and the dark cavity of its throat beyond them.
The third was missing an arm—gone from just below the shoulder, the stump ragged and wet, shredded muscle and the white jut of snapped bone visible even from this distance.
The fourth was the smallest. I didn’t want to look at the fourth. I made myself look anyway. A teenager, no more than sixteen. Half its scalp peeled back, hanging down over one ear like a wet rag, exposing the curve of the skull beneath—white bone streaked with red. He was smiling. Not really—his face was frozen, muscles pulling his lips back from his teeth—but in the headlights, it looked like a smile.
They were looking right at us.
“Fuck,” I whispered. The word was barely a vibration in my throat. “Callan… what the fuck are they?”