The alley spat them onto the service road like a seed. Trash cans pinwheeled in their wake. Something clipped the tailgate and bounced into darkness, and for a full heartbeat Gavin didn't breathe at all—he just let the truck run.
"Seatbelt," he said.
Madison snapped his home with hands that still shook. "You got a plan?"
"Stay ahead. Don't stop."
"That a plan or a prayer?"
"Both."
He punched the accelerator. Sodium lights strobed past in jaundiced halos. In the mirror, the broken gate framed the alley like a torn eyelid. Then shadows poured out of it—six at first, then more, their strides crooked but fast, heads pitched forward, arms windmilling in jagged rhythm. They looked like footage sped up until it wasn't funny anymore.
"Jesus," Madison breathed. "They're hauling."
"Hold on." He took the corner onto a feeder lane too hot, tires chirping, sidewalls whining. He felt the big truck settle, the rear drifting a breath before the weight came back to heel. Mass and momentum still obeyed. Whatever else had broken tonight, physics hadn't gotten the memo.
Ahead, the ramp to the interstate curled left under a swarm of hazard blinkers. Cars stacked wrong across its crown, doors open, a stroller tipped on its side in the shoulder. Under the blinkers, two shapes moved the way fog does when it remembers it used to be breath.
"Nope," Madison said. "Nope, nope—"
Gavin steered away from the ramp and dove beneath the overpass instead, riding the frontage road while the interstate above them made a low, continuous sound like the world grinding its teeth. Footsteps rippled overhead—dozens, then hundreds, the skitter of rubber on concrete like a storm of rats.
A body fell.
It came spinning out of the night like trash tossed from a truck, hit the pavement twenty feet ahead, bounced, and began to crawl even as its cheek hung like wet paper. Another dropped and missed the hood by a handspan, smearing the windshield with a brief red comet. The glass sang.
"Drive!" Madison yelled, as if the word were a spell.
"I am," Gavin grunted, threading between fallers as if they were tires on a practice field. Two more hit behind them, one on the roof with a drumhead thump, one under the bumper with a sound like snapping chair legs. The truck flinched and kept going.
The frontage road spat them past a dead gas station. A man in a polo stood at pump six with the hose still in his hand, staring at a sky that refused to offer instructions. The marquee read $3.09 and then flickered, lost a digit, and declared $ . 9 in green stutter before going dark.
They took the next cut-through, bouncing over a curb into a strip of potholes that had once been asphalt. A billboard loomed ahead—smiling teeth promising better ones—then vanished behind them. The city thinned to warehouses and long rectangles of field. The horn chorus of downtown drained away until the night was mostly wind, engine, and the small sounds of a big machine doing exactly what it had been built to do.
Madison exhaled for the first time since the gate. "What's at your place?"
"Rifle, shotgun, generator. Cans in the pantry. CB in the mudroom if the towers are dead."
"You think the towers are dead?"
"I think there's no one left to answer them."
Madison did a quick inventory of the cab—glove box, door pockets—as if bullets might bloom there like mushrooms after rain. "Six in the wheelgun?"
"Four now."
"That's not a lot."
"It's four more than the guy who trusted the valet."
A light crossed the sky ahead of them—the blunt nose of a helicopter dragging a searchbeam across rooftops in a drunk arc. The beam skated over a church steeple, paused as if considering prayer, then slid away toward the glow leaking out of downtown.
They caught a green light at an intersection too wide for its own good. A cruiser sat idling at the far curb, driver's door open, lightbar performing a silent routine for an audience that had lost interest. The officer lay ten yards away on his back with his hat upside down near his hand, like he'd meant to catch rain and got something else.
"Don't slow," Madison said.
"I'm not."
The green bled to yellow in the rearview. They took the county road north where oaks arched over the lanes and knitted the night into a tunnel. The truck's high beams made twin cones in a dark that felt older than asphalt. Crickets tried to find their song and failed, starting and stopping in skips like a scratched record.
"You sure they won't have your address in a press release somewhere?" Madison asked. "You know—America's Quarterback's childhood home, blah blah?"
"Let them come," Gavin said, and surprised himself with how little heat was in it. He wasn't threatening anything. He was tired. "It's back off the county route. You don't find it twice unless you have a reason."
He smelled the smoke before he saw the glow—a campfire smell made big and wet, a taste on the tongue like pennies warmed in a palm. The road curved, trees fell away, and a soft dome of orange lifted over the next rise.
"My place," he said, and didn't realize he'd said it until Madison turned.
"You sure?"
"I left the porch light on," he said. His mouth tried on a smile that didn't fit.
He killed the headlights a hundred yards out and let the truck idle behind the pecans he'd parked behind as a teenager coming home drunk. Heat traveled with the night breeze. The barn was a square of black with flames licking its roofline, testing, then leaning back as if waiting for permission. Sparks went up in frantic shoals. The pasture fence beside it lay broken, posts strewn like snapped bones. Nothing lowed from the dark.
"Someone's here," Madison murmured.
"Or was," Gavin said.
They eased the doors shut instead of slamming them. Gravel spoke under their boots. The porch steps knew his weight and complained exactly where they always had. At the top, he could see boot prints in the dust on the boards—fresh, deep—and a scatter of smaller prints over them, bare and splayed.
Front or back? His hand went to the knob without asking permission from his brain. He pushed the door half open and stayed behind the frame as the room's shape poured itself into view. Lemon oil. Smoke. That high, sweet rot of fruit gone to sugar. The small table by the coat tree had a picture frame on it, face down like it had fainted. He set it upright with two fingers. His mother smiled from a summer that never thought about tonight.
"Clear left," Madison breathed.
Gavin angled right toward the kitchen, mind angling with him: generator switch, back door sight line, mudroom radio. The generator's breaker sat where it had always sat, under a flap of painted tin. He flipped it. Out by the shed a grumpy engine coughed awake, took offense, and then agreed to do its job. The house flickered once and then settled into a yellow that made shadows thick.
The refrigerator hummed. The old clock over the stove ticked like a heart taking a breath to steady itself.
"Radio?" Madison asked.
"Mudroom." The transceiver sat on its shelf with its coiled mic draped over it like a sleeping snake. Gavin flicked the toggle. Static filled the room—thin, eager. He rolled the dial: hiss, hiss, a shape of a voice, hiss.
"—north— …copy?— …any units— …break— …"
He eased back and the voice sharpened, fragile as glass.
"Say again," Gavin said into the mic. His hands were steady and he noticed it.
"—anyone reading— …we have…—" The rest drowned in a wash that sounded like applause in an empty room.
"Location," he said. "Give location."
"—facility…north loop…—If you can hear this— …do not…" The line snapped like a cable under too much weight. Static swallowed the idea of a voice.
Madison looked at the speaker as if waiting for it to apologize. Riley wasn't here to ask questions about loops and facilities and north. For a second Gavin saw her anyway, someone he hadn't met yet casting a shadow on the kitchen tiles of his memory.
The house changed. He didn't hear the first step so much as he felt the shift in the wood above them—the way old boards tell you they remember feet. Then a second step, quicker. Then a third, closer to the landing.
"Upstairs," Madison whispered.
"Basement," Gavin said. "Too many doors up top. Down there, one way in."
They moved as if they'd practiced it: through the back hall to the cellar door, hands low, shoulders turned to keep knife and barrel clear. The door groaned softly. A draft breathed up, cool and damp, carrying the smell of concrete and onion skins and oil. He didn't try the light. He knew where it would be and didn't want the stairwell announcing itself. He went first, one hand skimming the wall, counting steps—one, two, three—thirteen to the floor. Madison behind him, breathing measured. The house above them paused as if listening for its own heartbeat.
At the ninth step, bare feet found the kitchen tile and loved it.
The sound they made wasn't walking; it was remembering how. A long smear slid from the sink to the hall like someone had decided they were a mop. Something bumped the cabinet door where his mother kept cake pans and then patted it twice, as if congratulating it for existing.
"Quiet," Gavin breathed, and wasn't sure whether he meant the thing or the giant behind him trying not to exist too loudly.
They reached the bottom. The concrete floor was cool through his soles. Shadows stacked in the corners—paint cans, the old deer feeder, a crate of ball jars his father had promised to fill one more summer and never had. He led them behind the workbench where the cinderblock foundation made a snug L. From there they could see the stairs without offering their faces to the opening.
He raised the revolver and aimed at the square of dim above the top riser. He wanted to breathe slow; his lungs had decided to pant.
On the twelfth stair from the top, something small and hard fell—maybe a screw—and pinged down a step, then another, and then skittered the rest of the way like a mouse made of tin. It hit the floor near his boot and spun itself quiet.
The thing above sniffed. The sound wasn't dog. It was a person hitting the limit of what a broken nose could do.
It descended.
Not fast. One foot found the edge of a stair with the careful scrape of someone who hadn't earned trust from their feet yet. A hand slid down the wall, nails testing paint. Another step. Another. It paused three stairs from the bottom and made a sound like laughter being taught to someone who had never heard a joke.
Madison's knife creaked in his grip.
"Easy," Gavin whispered.
The head came into view: a man's crown with hair combed too neatly to be tonight's. Then the rest of the face—wrong where it had been right, mouth unhinged a little by a jaw that didn't sit where jaws sit. One eye clouded. The other clear and rimmed with red, rolling too fast in its socket like a bead on a wire.
It turned its face toward the smell of them and smiled too wide.
Gavin fired.
The flash lit the underside of the stairs and printed their shapes in negative—one tall, one massive—in the basement air. The body bucked and thumped backwards into the riser it had just left, then slid down the last two steps on its hip and found the floor with its hands, eager to keep coming. He fired again into the place where face had been. The tunnel-bang rang off cinderblock and came back as thunder.
The thing stopped.
Dust sifted from the stair's lip. Somewhere in the house a picture frame tipped and settled. The barn outside breathed in and out with the crackle of timbers surrendering their arguments to flame.
"Two left," Madison said, voice small in the big man.
Gavin's ears filled with sea-noise. He lowered the revolver and let the weight hang like a question. "We hole up," he said. "We wait. First light, we go."
"Go where?"
"North loop," he said, because the radio had made it sound like a direction and he needed one. "Find out what 'do not' meant."
Madison glanced at the stair. "If there's a first light."
"There will be." He didn't know if he believed that, but the words fit in his mouth, and right now that was enough.
They moved deeper into the corner. The generator's thrum came through the walls, steady as a ship engine. Smoke from the barn ghosted down the vents and put a taste on the tongue like toasted coins.
Above them, the house paused again.
Then, as if the floor itself had decided to learn running, feet gathered in the hall—many—and struck the boards at once. The first impact rattled dust from the joists. The second found the stairs.
They were not careful anymore.