The weak, grey light filtering through the foyer windows hit the figure standing on the stairs.
Tally's twisted smirk died instantly.
It wasn't a burglar.
"Justin?" she breathed.
Her older brother stepped down onto the landing. He looked like hell. His salt-stained hoodie smelled like stale Wawa coffee, burned rubber, and cold Pennsylvania turnpike air—a sharp, offensive contrast to the expensive vanilla-scented candles their mom usually kept lit.
The reality of him being here, standing in the dim light of their Savannah foyer at eleven in the morning instead of a library in State College, felt like a glitch in the simulation. Tally's brain kept trying to reboot, trying to find a logical reason for her brother to be standing on their rug looking like he'd crawled out of a storm drain.
Her body reacted before her pride could stop it. She dropped the heavy chef's knife—it clattered loudly against the hardwood floor—and stepped into him hard, burying her face in the rough, pilled fabric of his sweatshirt. For a split second, the world outside—Eric Miller violently seizing in his own black blood, the girl walking in circles in the woods, the relentless, overlapping sirens—faded.
Justin was the anchor. He was the one who had taught her how to throw a spiral, how to spot a lie, and how to survive their father's silent, military-grade expectations.
But when he didn't wrap his arms back around her with his usual crushing bear hug, she pulled away, her cheeks flushing hot with embarrassment and immediate irritation.
"What the fuck, Justin?" she snapped, scrubbing her face with the heel of her hand and stepping aggressively toward the kitchen island. Her cramps flared, twisting her stomach, and her voice came out too high, too brittle. "You owe me for the emotional damage. I almost stabbed you. Why the hell aren't you in Pennsylvania? It's eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. You're supposed to be failing Organic Chemistry, not sneaking around the house like a serial killer."
Justin didn't answer. He didn't even look at her. He moved past her into the kitchen with a frantic, focused energy that made the hair on her arms stand up. He began opening the lower custom cabinets, his movements jerky and loud, pulling out every empty Tupperware container, every Nalgene bottle, and the oversized glass pitchers their mom used for sweet tea.
"I left the dorms three days ago," he said, his voice flat and robotic. "I didn't even pack. I just grabbed my keys and started the car."
"Three days ago? Justin, you haven't even had your winter formal yet." Tally watched him line the bottles up under the faucet. The sound of the water rushing into the sink was abnormally loud in the silent house. "You're acting like a freak. Turn the water off. You're splashing the granite, and Mom is going to lose her shit when she gets off her double shift at Memorial."
"I saw things on the way down, Tal. On the I-95." He finally turned the faucet off and looked at her.
The sight stopped her breath. His eyes weren't just tired; they were bloodshot, rimmed with a deep, hollow exhaustion.
"It started in Philly," Justin said. "Just… glitches. The power would drop for an hour, then snap back. But the people didn't snap back. They started getting this flu. Not a normal flu. They'd just stop. I saw a girl in the middle of a crosswalk, just standing there while a bus honked. She was staring at nothing, sweating through her coat in thirty-degree weather. And then she started screaming. Not because she was scared. Because she was… leaking."
Tally scoffed, a sharp, highly defensive sound. "It's a fucking virus, Justin. It's 2025; we've lived through this. Kenzie's mom is an ER nurse, and she said people are panicking because the news is blowing it out of proportion. It's just a bad strain."
"It's not a mutation," Justin snapped, his hands shaking as he gripped the edge of the counter. "I passed a pile-up near D.C. A twelve-car wreck in the middle of a clear day. No police. No ambulances. Just people sitting in their smashed cars, staring at the dashboards while the engines smoked. I saw a guy… he was trying to climb over a concrete highway divider, but his hands were shredded to the bone, and he didn't even seem to notice the pain. He was just trying to get to the other side. Like he'd forgotten how to be a person."
Tally's mind flashed violently back to Eric's shattered teeth. To the girl at the edge of the school woods with her throat ripped open. The way her head had been tilted—wrong.
She forced the image down, burying it under a thick layer of wealthy suburban denial. "You're being dramatic," Tally said, her voice rising. "You've been drinking too much Red Bull. You drove fifteen hours on a whim."
"I saw the towers go dark in North Carolina, Tally! One by one, the horizon just vanished. That's why I'm here. I had to get south of the line before the grid went completely."
A sound drifted from the hallway—the soft rustle of fabric, followed by a cough that was quickly muffled.
Tally's body went rigid. "Justin. Who the fuck else is in this house?"
Justin sighed, a long, ragged sound. He glanced toward the darkened living room. "I couldn't leave her. Her car ran out of gas near the border. The stations were already being looted."
A woman stepped into the kitchen doorway. She was wrapped in a thick wool coat, her hands tucked deep into the sleeves. Her blonde hair was pulled back, and her green eyes were sharp, tracking Tally's hostile reaction with a mix of apology and caution.
"Hi," she said gently. "I'm Mari. I promise I'm not a squatter. I was a T.A. in Justin's psych department."
Tally blinked, looking the woman up and down with blistering judgment. "You brought a random TA? Are you kidding me? We don't even let the neighbors in without an RSVP."
"Mom isn't here, Tally," Justin said, his voice dropping an octave. "And neither is Dad. And they aren't answering their phones."
"Because the cell towers are down, genius!" Tally shouted, pointing at her dead phone on the counter. "You're acting like the world ended because the 5G cut out. It's Savannah. A light breeze knocks the power out here."
Mari stepped forward into the kitchen. "The power didn't just go out, Tally. We passed a Walmart in Florence. The automatic doors were off the hinges, but people weren't taking TVs. They were just… standing in the aisles. Some of them were fighting, but it wasn't over food. I saw a man trying to bite the neck of a security guard. It wasn't a robbery. It was a feeding."
Tally looked from Mari to Justin. They looked like two people who had seen a ghost and were waiting for her to stop pretending she hadn't seen the smoke on the horizon.
"House rules," Tally said, her voice trembling despite her best efforts to sound commanding. "Don't touch Mom's mugs. Don't go in my room. And stop talking like we're in a fucking movie. It's embarrassing. Everything is fine."
Despite her words, the massive house didn't feel fine. It felt like a fortress under siege in the middle of a bright, sunny Tuesday.
Justin didn't stop to argue. He moved with a grim efficiency he'd clearly inherited from their military father. He made Tally help him fill the bathtubs—an old hurricane trick they used when the coast flooded.
"Why are we doing this?" Tally complained, crossing her arms as she watched the water swirl into the master bath. "It's barely noon. We should be calling the electric company."
"The city water pressure is already dropping," Justin said, not looking up from the faucet. "If the municipal pumps at the station fail, this is all we have. Fill the guest tub next."
Mari helped Tally move the heavy teak porch furniture into the mudroom to block the secondary doors. It felt like a fever dream—moving expensive outdoor chairs into a hallway because her brother was convinced society was collapsing. They worked while the heavy standby generator hummed to life in the backyard—a steady, artificial heartbeat keeping the lights on in the house.
Tally's mind kept drifting back to the school parking lot. The sickening crunch of the laptop under her Audi's tires. She thought about Kenzie locking her front door with three clicks. Had Kenzie's mom made it home from the ER? Was Kenzie sitting in her own dark house, staring at a dead phone?
At 11:45 AM, the sun was high, casting bright, cruel light across the manicured cul-de-sac. It should have been the time of day when the neighborhood was quiet for the workday lull, but the air outside felt incredibly heavy.
"See?" Tally said, standing at the living room window, pulling back the sheer curtain. "It's a beautiful day. Everyone is just laying low."
"Then why are all their cars in the driveways?" Justin asked, appearing silently behind her. "Mrs. Harland should be at her bridge club. The Miller kids should be at school with you. Look at the Henderson house."
Tally looked across the street. The Hendersons were obsessed with their lawn. The massive house was entirely dark. The front door was wide open, swinging back and forth on its hinges in the light winter breeze.
"They probably left," Tally whispered.
"Without closing the door?" Justin asked softly.
Suddenly, the dogs stopped.
It wasn't a gradual quieting down. It was a synchronized, total cessation of noise. One second, the wealthy subdivision was a wall of frantic, terrified howling; the next, it was a vacuum.
The silence that followed was heavy—thick and unnatural, like a physical weight pressing against the windowpanes in the midday sun.
"They finally tired themselves out," Tally said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Justin didn't respond. He reached out and slowly, deliberately, pulled the heavy velvet curtains shut, overlapping the thick fabric so not a single sliver of the Georgia sunlight could leak in.
"While the lights still work," he said, stepping back from the glass, "we stay away from the windows."
"You're scaring me, Justin," Tally said, her bottom lip finally trembling. Her bitchy armor was cracking, piece by piece. "Stop it. Call Dad. Use your satellite emergency thing on your watch."
"I tried," Justin said. "It can't find a signal. Whatever this is… it's high up, Tally."
Mari was sitting on the expensive living room sofa behind them, staring hard at a paper map of Georgia she had spread across the glass coffee table. The generator-powered lamp in the corner cast long shadows across the room.
"The bases will be the first to close their gates," Mari said, tracing a line with her finger. "If your dad is at Fort Stewart, he's locked in. They won't let him leave until they know what the contagion vector is."
"Contagion?" Tally snapped. "It's a flu!"
"Maybe it is," Mari said. Her green eyes were wide, looking up at the high school senior. "The world ends all the time, Tally. For someone, somewhere, the world ended today. We just have to make sure it's not ours."
Far off, toward the Savannah city center, there was a series of low, rhythmic thuds. It sounded like something heavy, something massive, hitting the earth.
And then, much closer—maybe only three houses down—a single human scream tore through the morning air.
It wasn't a scream of panic. It was a jagged, visceral sound—the horrific sound of something being torn apart. It cut off so abruptly that the silence afterward felt like a physical blow to the chest.
Tally sank onto the sofa beside Mari, her hands shaking uncontrollably. She reached into her designer bag and pulled out her phone one last time. She wanted to see a notification. A TikTok. A text from her mom saying, Sorry, I'm picking up lunch.
The screen stayed black. A twelve-hundred-dollar piece of glass and metal that told her nothing.
"Tally," Justin said, sitting on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. "Look at me."
"I want Mom," she whispered, the untouchable high school queen gone, leaving only a terrified seventeen-year-old girl in her place.
"I know," Justin said gently. "But we have the generator. We have the house. We just have to wait for Dad to get back from the base."
"He'll be here," Tally whispered, clinging desperately to the image of her father in his pristine military uniform. "He's probably the one fixing it right now."
Justin didn't contradict her. He just looked past her, staring blankly toward the heavy, locked front door.
The generator hummed loudly in the backyard. The lights stayed on.
While they still could.