The sky was wrong.
Elara remembered that first. Not the heat on her face or the taste of smoke in her mouth. Not the weight of her father's hand crushing hers as he pulled her through a crowd that moved like a broken river. She remembered looking up and seeing the moon swollen and red, like something sick and angry hanging over the city. The blood moon.
Sirens wailed from every direction. The sound slid in and out of itself, broken by the chatter of gunfire and the hard, panicked voices of people who thought shouting could hold back the end. Car alarms warbled. Somewhere glass shattered in a rushing, bell-like spill. The air stank — hot rubber, burst fuel, the copper of blood.
"Keep moving," her mother said. Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut through everything. "Elara, eyes on me. Don't look back, sweetheart."
Elara was seven and already knew that sometimes grown-ups lied. They said things like it will be fine or almost there when it wasn't and they weren't. She tried to keep her gaze on the pale triangle of her mother's face, on the freckle near her mouth that only showed when she was scared. But the world kept pulling her eyes away.
Shapes darted between the cars wedged nose-to-tail across the street. Too fast to be people, too big to be dogs. They moved wrong, hips rolling, shoulders hunching, heads whipping toward sound. When they hit light, their eyes flashed a dull, dead white that made Elara's stomach pitch. When they hit people, there was always the same wet sound and the same sudden stop to the screaming.
A man ran past with a hunting rifle banging his thigh. He glanced back, lifted the gun, and fired. The bolt of light from the muzzle punched the night. Something snarled in the smoke. He racked the bolt and fired again. And again. He didn't look where he was going. He tripped over a fallen scooter and vanished as if the street itself swallowed him.
"Don't look," Elara's mother said, but Elara already had. The man's rifle clattered, spinning. Two shapes fell where he had been — one too big, one too wrong.
"Left!" her father barked, dragging them into an alley where the stink concentrated into something animal and sour. He had a pistol he'd kept in a lockbox above the wardrobe for years, a thing that meant nothing when she was little and now meant everything. He'd checked the chamber twice before they left their apartment. He'd kissed Elara's hair. He'd said, "If we get downstairs quick, we can get to the bridge."
The alley opened onto another street. People poured across it in both directions, heads down, a herd without a shepherd. A woman pushed a stroller with nothing in it. A boy carried a cat in his arms and didn't blink. Two soldiers, or maybe just men in mismatched armor with armbands, stood near a barricade of bins and pallets, firing in dovetailed bursts into something Elara couldn't see. One shouted into a radio that shrieked back static and the empty sound of voices too far away to help.
Her father slowed, shoulders tight as if he could make himself into a wall. He scanned, jaw muscle jumping. "Through there," he said, pointing to a gap between a bus on its side and a burning delivery van. He pushed forward, clearing the way with the sharp edge of his arm, apologizing and not meaning it. Elara clung to his wrist; her mother clung to Elara.
They were almost to the gap when it hit.
It came low, slamming into the bus with a hollow metal boom that shivered through Elara's teeth. A shape spilled out of the smoke and fire — long, lean, slick with something that might have been rain if rain had been thick and red. Its hands — if they were hands — scrabbled and left crescents in the soot. Its head lifted. Its mouth opened too wide.
Her father did not hesitate. He shoved Elara and her mother behind him and raised the pistol.
The first shot missed. She saw the spark skip off the bus. The second hit; the thing jerked and snarled as if offended. The third, fourth, fifth pushed it back two steps but didn't change its mind. Her father emptied the magazine in a flurry of muzzle flashes that punched the dark and painted the beast in strobe-lit pieces — a human shoulder, a wolfish forearm, the branching scars on its chest like a map of lightning.
"Run!" he shouted. "Go!"
Her mother hauled Elara backward, feet slipping on trash and grit. Elara reached for her father even as she moved away, fingers opening and closing on nothing, the elastic hurt of her arm as her mother dragged her the only thing keeping her from turning around.
The pistol clicked on an empty chamber.
The beast crossed the gap between them in one bound.
It hit her father high and drove him to the asphalt. The sound he made was not a word. The gun skittered, metal ringing as it went under the bus. Elara saw her father's hands shove at the thing's chest, felt the rubber-band snap of her mother's grip tightening, heard herself make a sound like a swallowed scream. Then the beast's head dipped. There was the ugly, deep sound of teeth finding something soft. And then… nothing.
Her mother's breath went sharp. "Elara, now. Now."
They ran.
They ran past people whose faces were smears of fear, past a parking meter bent double, past a stopped bus where the driver sat with both hands on the wheel as if refusing to admit it was over. They ran down a flight of stairs choked with bodies and abandoned bags into a tiled cavern where the air went cool and the noise changed from open chaos to contained panic. The sign above the steps read SOUTHBOUND in clean letters that looked like a joke.
The underground station had become a room for hiding. People packed into the corners and under the lip of the ticket counters. The vending machines stood half-gutted, coils of snacks visible and suddenly useless. Someone had dragged benches across the entrance and looped chains through them, securing them to the handrails with padlocks that would do nothing if anything determined to come in decided to. At the top of the stairs a pair of men in flak jackets and pitted helmets braced themselves and fired slow, careful shots up the stairwell. Another man with a sawn-off shotgun kept his back to them, eyes on the room, face scrubbed clean of expression.
"Closed," the shotgun man said to a woman pleading with him to let her husband in. "We're full. We're full."
"We can make room," the woman said. "Please, he's—"
A howl rolled across the station from above — not a dog's sound, not a person's, something scraped raw and wrong. It slid down the stairs and along the ceiling, thin as wire. The woman's voice broke. The shotgun man shook his head.
Elara's mother steered them toward a wall by a map of colored lines and stations with names that meant nothing now. They sank to the cold tile. Elara's chest hurt like she'd been running for hours. She tried to breathe slow like her teacher said when she had nightmares. She inhaled smoke and exhaled shaking.
"Water," her mother murmured, half to Elara, half to herself. She dug in her bag with fingers that didn't want to work, found a bottle, unscrewed it, handed it over and didn't seem to notice when most of it went down Elara's chin.
Across the station a generator thudded itself awake with a cough and a whine. One row of lights flickered on, then steadied. Faces sprang into relief — gray with dust, slick with sweat, striped with tears. A boy Elara's age clutched a plastic dinosaur so hard its tail bent. An old man in a suit sat with his back to a pillar and stared straight ahead, hands folded in his lap as if waiting for a train. A teen with a shaved head had a towel pressed to his side and stared at the floor, jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped.
"Has anyone seen my sister?" a voice called. "Tara? Tara!"
"Quiet," someone else hissed. "For God's sake, quiet."
Gunfire cracked above. One of the flak-jacket men flinched, then steadied his rifle again. A second howl answered the first, closer this time. The shotgun man swore under his breath.
Elara turned her face into her mother's coat, breathing in the warm, familiar smell of laundry powder and the faint spice of her perfume. The smell made the space behind Elara's eyes go hot again. She pressed her hands over her ears until the world narrowed to heartbeat and breath. Her mother held her tighter and rocked once, twice. "It's okay," she lied. "I've got you. I've got you."
Minutes folded over themselves. A woman in a nurse's scrub top went from group to group with a plastic box, handing out bandages and advice in a calm, even tone that made people listen. When she crouched near them and asked, "Any injuries?" Elara's mother shook her head. The nurse's smile was small and human and hurt to look at.
"Do we—" Elara's mother began, then stopped because her voice trembled. She cleared it and tried again. "Do we stay here? Will they move us?"
"For now," the nurse said. "They'll try to hold until morning. More help might come." She said the words like instructions she'd been given to repeat. Then she squeezed Elara's shoulder and moved on.
Elara's eyelids tugged at themselves. Exhaustion came like a tide, pulling, pulling. The station's sounds blurred — crying thinning to whimpering, gunfire to a distant itch in the air, someone's low voice telling a story that wasn't for her. Her breathing slowed. Her mother's hand stroked her hair, over and over, smoothing it like it could smooth the night.
Across from them, near the shadowed lip of the platform, a woman sat with her back to the wall. She wore a denim jacket dark with wet across the sleeve. Her head lolled slightly as if sleep wanted her but couldn't quite find the grip. She stared at nothing. Her mouth worked every now and then, like she was chewing a thought.
Elara might not have seen her if the generator's light hadn't hiccupped and steadied again, brightening the corners. The new light caught on a thin line of red trickling down the woman's wrist, beading at her palm before falling in soft taps to the tile between her boots. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Elara's eyes snagged on the sound. Tap. Tap.
The woman lifted her hand to press it higher against her chest. The wet fabric shifted and wrinkled. The torn sleeve slid back.
Underneath, her forearm was a mess of purpled skin and chewed meat. And in the wreckage, spaced with the kind of awful intent only teeth could leave, were two neat curves — upper and lower, deep as if someone had set a jaw and closed it.
Elara knew bites. She'd fallen off her bike into a dog once, years ago, and it had nipped her calf before her father scooped her up and the owner cried apologies. The little half-moons the dog left had faded with summer. These weren't like that. These were… wrong. These looked like the mouth that had opened in the alley. Like the eyes that glowed in the dark.
The woman's lips moved. Maybe she was praying. Maybe she was counting. Maybe she was just trying to keep the pieces of herself together by naming them. Her eyes slid sideways, not really seeing. Sweat stood on her forehead in a shining row.
Elara felt her own breath shorten, as if the air had thinned around her. She reached for her mother's sleeve without looking away. Her fingers found fabric and clenched.
Her mother followed her gaze. Elara felt her mother's body go still the way a deer goes still when it smells the thing that will end it. Just still. Then her mother's hand came down over Elara's and pressed, gentle and hard at the same time.
"Don't stare," she whispered, the words barely a shape. "Elara. Don't."
Elara tried to look down. She tried to be good. But her eyes kept creeping back to the wound because it was the only honest thing in the room. The men with guns were pretending the door would hold. The people with their heads down were pretending they were invisible. The boy with the dinosaur was pretending that plastic mattered. The wound didn't pretend. It was there. It was already deciding what came next.
A child coughed. Someone near the entrance asked, too brightly, if anyone had seen a charger. A laugh burst out of a stranger and broke halfway into a sob. Above them, another howl unfurled, long and curdled at the end, and this one seemed closer, as if the sound had found the stairwell and was taste-testing the chains across the doors.
The woman with the denim jacket closed her eyes. Her jaw trembled. She pressed her arm harder to her chest, and a fresh line of blood escaped the edges of her fingers and ran down to her elbow, quick and determined, like it had somewhere it needed to be.
Elara's mother drew her in, so close Elara could hear the fast, rabbit beat of her mother's heart. "Sleep," her mother said, though sleep felt like a trick now. "Sleep if you can."
Elara nodded against the fabric because that was the thing she could do. She let her eyes fall to a crack in the tile by her shoe and stared at it until it became a valley, a riverbed, a safe place to walk. She breathed with the crack. In. Out. In. Out. She counted each breath to ten and started again and did not look up when someone near the platform started to cry and did not stop when the generator hiccupped and everything blinked.
But even with her eyes down, the world seeped in. The metallic smell. The soft tap… tap… tap of blood on the floor. The close heat of too many bodies in not enough space. The memory of her father's hand and the way it had let go.
The monsters were outside. Everyone said so. The chains on the doors proved it, the guns, the eyes fixed on the stairwell. Outside was where the danger howled.
Elara knew, because she was seven and because she was paying attention, that the monsters were here too.
They were already inside.