The county road bled into a two-lane blacktop and then widened to four, the shoulders flecked with the glitter of bottle glass and mica. The truck ate distance in steady bites. Wind pressed against the cab and worried the smoke out of their clothes. Somewhere behind them, a barn finished burning and fell in on itself; the night swallowed the noise, and the dark ahead did not care.
"Keep an eye on the mirrors," Gavin said.
Madison did, jaw set. Riley crouched in the back seat with both hands around a warm bottle of water. They turned the heater down and cracked the windows. Cold air slid in, metallic with the faint sweetness of mown grass under the copper bite.
A highway sign surfaced from the dark: I–35 NORTH 2 MILES. Beneath it, a smaller panel flashed EMERGENCY ALERT: SHELTER IN PLACE, stuttered to blank gray, then flashed again, like a brain misfiring through a command it no longer believed.
"They want us to stay put," Madison said.
"Tonight that's just a slow way to die," Gavin said. "We get to the interstate. If it's a parking lot, we take the shoulder. If the shoulder's a cemetery, we make our own road."
"And if the road ends?"
"Then we don't."
No one laughed.
They climbed the on-ramp flyover beneath dead sodium lamps. Far below, a single horn held a flat note in some machine's dying throat. The ramp rose to meet the interstate and stalled into a still frame taken at the end of the world: tractor-trailers slewed across lanes, sedans nose-kissed under bumpers, a charter bus beached in the median. Headlights burned here and there, carving white tunnels through steam rising from ruptured radiators. Hazard lights blinked slow, indifferent applause.
"Jesus," Madison whispered.
Gavin braked to a creep and let the truck ride the shoulder. Tires bumped over plastic shrapnel and the bone-white ribs of shattered guardrail. They edged past a sedan with both doors flung wide as if the car had tried to take a breath and forgotten how. The driver slumped with his cheek against glass, eyes open to a sky that did not answer.
Beyond the bus, something moved.
Riley tapped the seatback twice—quiet warning. "There," she murmured.
A pack worked the median—four, then six, then more, numbers changing as bodies rose from between cars like fish drawn to chum. They moved with ugly confidence, weight pitched forward as if the earth were a treadmill set a notch too high. They didn't look up at the truck. They watched the road, the wind, the twitch of a tarp lifting and falling on a trailer.
"Motion," Riley breathed. "Don't—" She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
Gavin shifted to park. "We clear ourselves a lane," he said, voice barely air. "Quiet. If they turn, we freeze. No coughs. No scratches. If a bee lands on your eyeball, it's not there."
Madison swallowed hard enough to click. "Roger that."
They stepped into air that tasted like coins and wet plastic. The interstate hummed with the sound of distance—the unending note of engines running nowhere. Gavin eased around the nose of a semi and checked the gap beyond: two cars welded close by panic, then room enough for the truck if they could pivot one.
He pointed. Madison nodded. Hands to metal. Push.
The sedan skidded a half inch, tires squealing a complaint. A head snapped up in the median. The pack rippled—muscle remembering a thrown stone.
Gavin froze with his palms on the hood. Breath slowed on command, like before a snap when a stadium held its lungs. Madison went still beside him, eyes slitted, sweat tracking through soot down his temple.
Across two lanes, a shape loped between cars and paused, head tilted, listening to air. Close enough to see a clot of red in its ear, as if something inside had torn loose. It sniffed nothing and trotted on.
They waited until it vanished, then pushed again—slower. Rubber slid on asphalt in whispers beneath the louder noise in their heads. The car inched, pivoted. They made a gap. Riley ghosted from the truck, found a state trooper's flashlight, and set it on a hood with the beam pointed away. The light caught a torn paper map and made it glow as if it mattered. The pack shifted toward the trembling halo, fascinated by the flicker.
"Good," Gavin mouthed. He set his shoulder to the second car and shoved. A foot, then two. The gap widened into a thin line of escape.
"Back in," he breathed.
They slid into the cab. Somewhere a heavy thing fell. The sound rang like a bell. Four pale faces turned toward the noise. Gavin held his breath until his lungs stabbed.
A figure climbed onto the hood of a wrecked SUV and stood very still, every muscle coiled. It didn't look at them. It looked over them, like a lifeguard studying a riptide's new trick.
"Go," Madison mouthed.
Gavin let the truck do what it wanted—roll. They threaded the gap and climbed the shoulder, left tires on gravel, right tires kissing the white line. A suitcase lay split open, shirts spilling. A child's light-up sneaker blink-blinked weakly in their wake.
A mile of wreckage passed—static sculptures of decisions made badly and too late. In the second mile, the statues moved.
At a jackknifed tanker, two figures pulled on a third. For a heartbeat it looked like rescue: a man and a woman bent to free a trapped friend. Then the friend came out in pieces, and the man and woman went to their knees as if in prayer.
"Don't watch," Riley told herself, too low to command anyone else.
They wormed around the tanker. Ahead, blue strobes painted the world—the last heartbeat of a cruiser parked nose-to-nose with an ambulance whose back doors gaped. A stretcher hung halfway out, straps dangling, an IV bag swaying on its pole in a draft no one felt.
"Radio," Madison said, pointing.
The mic drooped from its bracket by the cord. Gavin braked. "Quick."
Madison bailed out, reached through the open cruiser, and yanked the mic. The radio hissed like a cat. He thumbed transmit, released, then did it again—just enough to wake the set. Static. Then a voice so thin it seemed ashamed of itself: "…—north loop…—repeat, do not approach—quarantine compromised—if you are mobile, avoid… avoid—" The rest dissolved into hiss and a long beeping that used to mean ready and now meant nobody had turned it off.
Madison tossed the mic and ran. A shape swung out from under the ambulance like a kid from monkey bars waiting for a laugh. It landed by his boots and sprang—too far, too fast. Madison's knife flashed on reflex. The blade split the lower jaw; the face shucked like a bad mask; teeth clacked on empty air an inch from his knee. Gavin reached across and yanked the passenger door while Madison dove. The door slammed on a reaching hand. Bones popped. The hand didn't withdraw. Madison kicked it free; it thumped on the floor mat like a filthy glove. He made a sound half laugh, half sob, and slammed the door hard enough to shake the glass.
"North loop is bad," he panted.
"Noted," Gavin said, and put them back in motion.
They rode the shoulder until even that fiction ended: a delivery box truck lay on its side, tailgate peeled up by force from inside. Beyond it, the shoulder dropped into a drainage ditch thick with brown water that reflected stars like a cheap lie.
"Can we crawl it?" Madison asked.
"Not with this weight." Gavin killed the engine. The quiet returned like an old friend who remembered your worst stories. "We clear the tailgate."
"With what?"
Gavin pointed at a tow strap coiled in the debris like a sleeping snake. He stepped out, looped it to their hitch and the wreck's rear axle. Riley slid from the cab and stayed small, eyes up. She raised two fingers toward the median. Gavin followed her gaze. Two silhouettes stood in the cut grass watching the strap with the avid patience of children at a magic show.
"Statues," Riley whispered.
They froze. The silhouettes rocked faintly, heads cocking in synchrony like birds tasting wind. After a long ten-count they drifted off, drawn by a ripple of flapping plastic.
Gavin eased behind the wheel, dropped the truck into low, and gave just enough gas. The strap went tight with a twang he felt in his teeth. The box truck shivered, shifted, rolled three inches. The strap squealed on metal. An inch. Another. The tailgate folded inward by degrees until there was space to climb the shoulder and slide past, mirrors breathing in to clear the scrape.
"Pretty," Madison said. "Do it again and I'll propose."
"Save it for the next gate," Gavin said.
They made the third mile. The city rose on their right, a bruise-glow against low cloud. Sirens flared somewhere empty and cut off, embarrassed. A digital pylon over an exit repeated SHELTER IN PLACE three times, then flipped to a cheerful rush-hour photo from a week that never met this one. Four lanes. Smiling cars. The suggestion that everything was fine.
Riley leaned between the seats. "If that transmission's the north loop, and they're warning people away, it means someone still thinks instructions matter."
"Or somebody set a loop before the lights went out," Madison said. "A corpse making a phone call."
"Either way," Gavin said, "we're not joining any crowd."
"What crowd?" Madison swept a hand at the graveyard of metal. "We're the last—"
Headlights bloomed in the mirror. For a heartbeat Gavin thought convoy, purpose, pulse. Then the lights jittered. The vehicles didn't travel lanes; they bounced across infield and shoulder, cutting wrong angles. The lead pickup—a lifted brute the color of dried blood—mounted the retaining wall, dropped, and chewed the median like it had a jaw. Figures stood in the beds. Not dead. Standing. Balanced as the suspensions bucked, hands hooked on roll bars. They rode without moving, heads fixed—statues strapped to a merry-go-round.
"Not rescue," Madison said.
High beams hit, and the world turned white. The riders blinked slowly—or didn't blink. Their faces were pale tides. As the trucks drew even, the riders didn't jump. They watched. One turned its head toward a shredded flag on a bent pole, then back to the pure forward line. The drivers—if drivers existed—kept their wheels where the path looked least like a choice.
Gavin killed their lights and eased off the gas. He let the convoy pass: three trucks, then four, then a flatbed stacked with pallets and four still figures arranged upon them like a choir that had forgotten the words. The last truck dragged a chain that threw sparks and sang on the road, a skirl of tuning forks.
"Why didn't they—" Madison stopped, throat working.
"They didn't see us move," Riley whispered. "They didn't care."
The convoy vanished into the knot of wreckage like bad thoughts scurrying into darker ones. Gavin slitted the headlights again and kept the truck crawling, breath thin, hands steady. The interstate sloped toward a river underpass where wrecks gathered like leaves at a drain. Signs for FM 412 / LAKE ROAD angled right.
"Off-ramp," he said.
They took it into an access road lined with chain-link and low, blocky warehouses. A forklift slept crooked in a bay, forks speared through plastic-wrapped something that slumped like bread left too long. A fox darted from under a semi, froze in their beams, then slid away with the efficient grace of a creature that keeps its name out of stories.
Past the second warehouse, a guard hut squatted beside a gate stitched in razor wire. A red sign barked NO TRESPASSING / STATE PROPERTY. Below it, a newer plate read TEMPORARY DISPERSAL POINT, arrow pointing north.
"That your loop?" Madison asked.
"Let's find out," Gavin said, and rolled through the open gate into night that—for the first time since the farm—sounded like night again: bugs, an owl, the low hum of a transformer that had chosen not to die just yet.
The road narrowed to a poured-concrete strip. Pine scrub pressed in. Ahead, two poles lifted white haloes over a chain-link fence and a gate with a keypad. Beyond the fence, concrete bunkers huddled low and windowless. A mast bristled with dishes and antennae. Spray paint slashed across the official stencils on the gate: STAY OUT. Beneath, neat smaller letters: THEY LEARNED THE CODE.
Gavin idled them to a stop. The keypad LEDs glowed a friendly green.
"What the hell does that mean?" Madison asked. "They learned the—"
"Watch," Riley said, breath fogging the glass.
On the other side of the fence, a shape stepped into the glow, then another, then two more. They walked to the keypad in a line, one behind the other, calm as parishioners. The first raised a finger and hovered over the numbers, then paused. The second did the same. The third. They didn't press. They repeated. Heads tilted toward the front hand as if studying the weight of air on each key.
"They're memorizing," Riley whispered.
The fourth pressed 1. The red LED flared. It pressed 1 again. No change. It turned its head and waited, patient as rain.
From deeper in the compound, a door banged. A man in a lab coat stumbled into the light, clutching a box to his chest. He saw the line at the keypad and froze. He lifted a hand as if to wave hello to people he'd known in a break room.
They all turned toward that motion.
"Don't," Riley breathed, to him or to God.
The box slid an inch. Glass clinked inside—coin-bright, promise-bright.
They ran.
The line dissolved into a straight sprint so sudden it felt like a jump cut. They hit the fence and the gate. One found the ledge of the keypad housing with a foot and climbed, hands hooking razor wire, skin shredding without complaint. Two more followed, moving like water remembering its gradient.
"Reverse," Madison said.
Gavin didn't move.
The lab coat dropped the box. Glass shattered. Something hissed. He took a step backward, then another, then broke and ran for the door. He made it three strides. The first one reached him. The second. The third.
Riley flinched, eyes closing on their own.
Gavin shifted to reverse.
The first climber hit the ground inside and didn't pause. The second dropped, rolled, and faced the truck's headlights with the calm of someone deciding when to cross. It took a step, then another, measuring—do cars move? Will this one? It raised a hand, palm out, not warding but testing: would the light change? Would the shadow move? Would the thing with eyes breathe?
"Don't move," Riley whispered.
They didn't.
The figure took a third step, tilted its head, lowered its hand, and turned away—redrawn by some other tremor: a moth, a swinging chain, a night bird dropping from the mast. It loped deeper into the compound, past the lab coat's ruin, and vanished into light.
Gavin rolled them back until scrub and shadow swallowed the gate.
"We can't stay here," Madison said.
"We weren't going to," Gavin answered, and turned the truck north, away from fence and mast and the idea of doors with codes.