Slow. Unsteady. Aimless.
They wandered without direction, without purpose. Some alone, drifting along sidewalks in halting, uneven steps. Some in small, loose clusters, moving vaguely together but not coordinated, not communicating, drawn to the same patch of ground for reasons unknown.
Like the woman from last night.
The same unnatural, broken movement. The same grotesque way they carried themselves, like a body still functioning, but whatever had been driving it—whatever had made it human—was gone.
At my side, Sloane stilled.
“Oh my God,” she gasped.
Her voice barely carried.
We stood there, frozen. Both of us were trying to take in the scale of what we were looking at and failing; it made little sense. It didn’t fit inside any frame of reference either of us had.
Not isolated.
This wasn’t a neighborhood, a district, a contained event with a perimeter and emergency responders and someone in charge.
This was everywhere.
As far as I could see in every direction that wasn’t ocean, the city was burning and full of the dead and the things that used to be living.
Movement caught my eye across the street at a gas station with a mini-mart attached—bright signage now dark, the pumps standing idle.
The front doors burst open.
A woman stumbled out. Young, maybe mid-twenties. Dark hair. She was moving fast, panicked, her body pitched forward with the desperate, graceless momentum of someone running on pure adrenaline. She looked over her shoulder as she cleared the door. Even from way up here, the emotions on her face were visible.
Terror.
She ran.
She made it about thirty feet.
One of them came through the door after her.
Fast.
Not the slow, shuffling things wandering the streets. This one moved. It covered the distance between the door and the woman in seconds. Its legs moved in a jerky, violent sprint that looked strange—as if the joints didn’t bend quite right,but the thing didn’t care, kept driving forward.
It hit her from behind.
The impact was hard enough that her feet left the ground. She went down face-first into the pavement, the thing on top of her.
She screamed.
The sound pierced the morning quiet, raw and ragged, full of fear. So pure it sounded like something being torn out of her, something fundamental that would never go back in.
She fought. Kicked. Twisted underneath it. Her hands clawed at the pavement, at its face, at anything. Her legs thrashed, fighting with everything she had.
It wasn’t enough, would never be enough.
More of them appeared.
Drawn by the sound, they were coming from between cars, from around corners, from doorways that had looked empty five seconds ago. Three. Four. Then too many to count, moving toward her with that horrible speed, converging on the sound of her screaming.
They fell on her.