He stood very still and listened to the mansion breathe.
The party sounds had fractured into something unrecognizable—isolated screams, a rush of running feet, a crash of glass, the sudden quiet that follows a hard impact. The bass was gone. The house had swallowed the music and was now digesting panic.
Gavin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the knife. Blood slicked the hilt where his fingers gripped it. His reflection in the minibar mirror was a stranger: torn shirt, streaks of red drying on his chest, eyes too bright. Somewhere beneath the adrenaline, he felt the yawning drop of what he'd done; but the drop had no bottom yet, so he didn't fall.
He checked his phone. No bars. Not even the pity single line you got in a basement. He toggled airplane mode off and on like a prayer. Nothing. No alerts. No emergency banner. The silence of the network felt worse than the screams outside. Silence meant whatever this was had outrun the people who normally told America what to think.
The bathroom was a throat of broken glass and cooling blood. He didn't look at it again. He crossed to the desk and yanked open drawers, each one a small universe of expensive nothing: engraved pens, blank stationery, a velvet pouch with cuff links shaped like tiny footballs. At the back of the bottom drawer, under a sheaf of embossed invitations and a square of black velvet, his fingers closed around something heavy and cold.
Revolver.
He pulled it out carefully, thumbed the cylinder. Loaded. Well-oiled. Texans collected art, cattle, and guns, often in that order. He slid the weapon into the waistband at the small of his back and took a breath that tasted like nickel.
The hallway beyond the suite door was a dim mouth. He crossed to it. The knob was slick under his palm. He was about to twist it when something on the other side moved. Not a footfall. A drag, as if someone's hand slid down the wall while they forgot how to stand.
He backed away two steps, knife angled.
"Gav!" The shout came low and urgent from just beyond the door, alive with a kind of fear he'd heard only once before—on the line of scrimmage, when a center realized too late he'd misread the coverage. "Gav, open up—please—it's me!"
He didn't move. The blade didn't waver. "Say something only I'd know."
A beat. Breathing. Then: "SMU. Laundry dock. Neon. That preacher's daughter. Coach said if you were faster climbing windows than reading safeties he'd make you a cornerback."
The memory hit with the embarrassing clarity of cold water. "Madison."
"Yeah, bitch. Open the damn door."
"Are you bit?"
"No!" The answer cracked. "No. I swear. Please."
Something heavier than a man slammed into the hallway wall far from the door. Plaster dust drifted down from the molding like gray snow. Madison's voice dropped. "Hurry."
Gavin slid the lock. He cracked the door and a gust of air pushed against it, hot and wet and smelling like copper and sweat. Madison barreled through, all bulk and beard and wild eyes, his tux jacket missing, his white shirt a map of red handprints and brown smears. Gavin slammed the door and threw the lock as something skittered past outside, fast and wrong, fingernails or shoes scraping a frantic line along the baseboard.
Madison leaned his back to the door and let his head thump once against the wood. His chest heaved. He looked at Gavin's knife and then down at himself, as if only noticing the blood now.
"It's not mine," he said, voice low and thick. "I didn't get touched."
Gavin stepped in and put two fingers under Madison's jaw, as if he were a horse buyer checking teeth, then scanned the big man's forearms, neck, scalpline. No obvious bites. A shallow cut on the elbow—superficial. "Whose?"
"Jalen. And—" Madison's throat worked, as if the next name was caught on a hook. "Eddie. I tried to pull Jalen. He screamed into my ear and then—" He didn't finish. His hands flexed open and closed, the way they did before a snap.
"What did you see?" Gavin asked.
Madison blinked, once, twice. Focus tightened like a fist. "The game room. We were playing 2K. Somebody's girl started shaking. I thought she needed water. Then she just… latched on. Took a mouthful of his cheek like it was a sandwich. The speed—bro, I swear to God—the speed. She was on him before anybody stood up. When we pulled, she took skin with her. Eddie tried to kick her off, but two more were already on him. I swung a stool. It broke. Didn't slow them. So I ran." He swallowed. "I ran."
"You did right," Gavin said, and surprised himself by how steady he sounded. "You did right."
"I think I peed a little."
"You can buy new pants later." Gavin flicked his eyes toward the bathroom. "Don't look in there."
Madison's gaze tracked anyway, then jerked back. He flinched like he'd been slapped. "Christ."
"Yeah."
They stood breathing together, the door humming under Madison's back with faint vibrations from the hall. Something out there panted, a wet huffing that rose and fell like a dog learning to imitate a person. It moved away. Their air cleared a little.
"What now?" Madison asked. "We sit tight? Call for help?"
"No phones. No bars."
"Landline?"
"Gone," Gavin said. "This place is built to be loud when it wants to be and quiet when it has to be. Right now it's too quiet."
Madison's eyes went to the revolver hilt peeking above Gavin's waistband. "How many?"
"Six."
"That's not a lot."
"It's six more than the guy down the hall who thought security could save him."
Madison scrubbed his face with both hands and left streaks on his cheeks like war paint. "You always this calm?"
"Only when I'm lying." Gavin went to the window and peeled the curtain an inch. "We need weapons. Barriers. Distance. If they're as fast as they look, we can't win a sprint. We have to win the angle."
"That's your stupid quarterback brain talking."
"It's the only one I've got."
Below, the yard looked worse. A chaise lounge had been dragged into the pool, a pale shape still clinging to its cushion with numb fingers. Out by the hedges, a cluster of figures jerked and convulsed, then broke apart like startled birds and sprinted in different directions at once. One slammed chest-first into the wrought-iron fence and rebounded without changing course. Pain didn't live in them. If it had, it had moved out and left the lights on.
Gavin let the curtain fall. "We go now," he said. "While the pack's distracted. We take the emergency stairs to level two. Grab anything we can swing or shoot. Then get to a garage."
"You think they'll let us walk to a garage?"
"I think if we stay here they'll knock, and I don't answer people who don't use words anymore."
Madison swallowed a laugh that wasn't a laugh. "Okay."
Gavin handed him the larger of the wall knives he'd taken. Madison tested the balance like a man deciding if a new tool would break or hold. He nodded once. The nod meant: I'll do it. It also meant: I'm terrified.
Gavin eased the lock and opened the door two inches. The hallway smelled like cologne turned sour and the exhaust of a machine that ran on meat. No movement for the span of three steady breaths. He opened wider. The carpet muffled their steps. The framed photographs—glossy shots of owners, governors, movie stars with big teeth—stared with the blank confidence of people who still believed their money could explain the world to itself.
They moved for the emergency exit at the end of the corridor. Ten yards. Eight. Six.
Something shifted behind them with a dry click, like a set of fingernails testing a doorknob.
"Don't run," Gavin said, though every cell in his body begged to sprint. "They're fast. But they're dumb."
Madison whispered, "They're hungry."
Five yards. Three.
The exit door wouldn't open.
Gavin set his shoulder and pushed. The bar didn't budge. He put the knife in his teeth and used both hands, felt the give of a deadbolt somebody had shoved through as a prank or a precaution. The thin metal protested but held.
From behind them came a sound like laughter imitated by a child who'd only heard it across a street. It raised the hair at the back of Gavin's neck. He glanced over his shoulder.
A man in a torn tuxedo and no shoes stood halfway down the hall, head tilted like he had heard something only he loved. His mouth hung open as if he were still trying to finish a thought that had started before his jaw forgot grammar. Blood striped his throat in finger-width lines. The wrongness of him wasn't in the blood, though. It lived in the way his weight sat too far forward on the balls of his feet, ready to launch, as if standing were a temporary experiment and sprinting was his default.
"Hey," Madison breathed.
"Don't," Gavin said.
The man's eyes found them—white film over blue—and his body snapped forward like a door slamming shut. He came fast. Too fast. The distance fell away in chunks.
Gavin lifted the revolver and fired.
The first shot caught the runner in the shoulder meat. The body twitched but didn't slow. Second shot—center chest. It rocked him. He staggered one step, then regained his acceleration like a machine recalibrating. The third shot came up an inch high and a fraction left—years of muscle memory guiding Gavin's hand to a target that moved like no receiver he'd ever timed.
The bullet ate his right eye.
The runner collapsed, legs tangling, body skidding on carpet as if pulled by wires cut mid-tug. He lay still. For one heartbeat. Then his fingers began to claw at the floor, pulling, as if the skull no longer needed the brain's permission to move.
"Door," Madison hissed.
Gavin holstered the revolver and threw his shoulder into the crash bar. Metal screamed. The bolt jumped half a centimeter. He set himself and hit it again, the way he'd hit men who thought he was too pretty to be tough. The bar bent, then snapped. The door banged open into a stairwell that smelled like concrete and dust.
They tumbled through. Madison slammed it behind them, and the echo rang down and down. A beat later, something struck the far side of the door with the force of a small car. The frame shuddered but held. A short, sucking pant whispered through the crack as if the thing had put its mouth to the seam to taste the air they'd left behind.
They moved downward. One landing. Another. Each step creaked and then found its voice again. The stairwell lights were on motion sensors, which meant they flickered to life just long enough to announce their presence, then dimmed to a sullen glow once the system decided nothing worth lighting had come through.
On the level below, the door's wired glass rectangle showed a slice of corridor: overturned catering carts, a sprawl of silver lids like fallen moons, a smear of footprints the color of rust. Gavin pressed his ear to the metal. No running. No laughter-that-wasn't. Just the hum of a building trying to remember how to be empty.
He nodded to Madison and eased the latch.
The corridor's air had weight. Hot kitchen smells had soured into something animal. Somewhere behind a set of double doors, a timer beeped, cheerful and oblivious. A single shoe lay in the middle of the tile, heel snapped.
They moved low and quick, knives down by their legs to keep the glint out of sight. The kitchen doors swung with the faintest whisper. Inside, stainless steel gleamed under fluorescent lights. Something had slid down the front of the walk-in freezer and dried there in parallel lines like rain that stained.
A chef's cleaver sat on a cutting board beside a half-prepped tray of citrus. Gavin took the cleaver, handed his smaller knife to Madison, kept the big one in the o-lineman's fist. He pocketed a paring knife with a point like a truth you didn't want to hear.
"Garage?" Madison murmured.
"Service hall," Gavin said, pointing with the cleaver. "If we're lucky, keys on hooks. If we're unlucky, a pile of—"
The walk-in door banged from inside.
Both men froze.
A slow, dragging thump pressed against the metal as if someone were leaning their full weight there, trying to remember their shape. The latch rattled. It wasn't locked. The seal held from habit.
Madison's eyes flicked to the handle. His hand tightened on the knife.
"Don't," Gavin whispered. "We don't open anything today we didn't close."
Madison swallowed. The thumping steadied into a rhythm, slow and patient, a metronome set to hunger.
Then the latch began to lift.