Wes stayed on the roof until the sun touched the horizon and the neon sign began its electric flicker. He counted seventeen vehicles in the lot, two more than yesterday, and tried to remember when each had arrived. Memory supplied only fragments: the brown sedan that had rolled in neutral at dawn, the delivery van half buried in sand beyond the pumps. He noted them in a pocket notebook, turning the page so the number of dead cars could not be ignored.
Below, the others moved through final tasks. He heard the grind of RayRay's saw as plywood sheets were trimmed to fit the last window. He heard Mara's voice, low and steady, reading numbers from cans she stacked inside the cooler. Elijah repeated each digit, a child's game that kept inventory from becoming panicked. Wes listened and felt the roof turn into a ledger: every sound a debit, every breath a credit he could not replace.
When the sky shifted to bruised purple he climbed down. RayRay waited at the hatch, face streaked with sweat and sawdust. He held the chapel bolt-action, four spare rounds cupped in his palm. "You're on second watch," he said. "Roof until two. Then Mara relieves you."
Wes nodded, took the rifle, and followed him into the dining room. Tables had been shoved against the walls to create a narrow corridor from kitchen to front door. Plywood sheets covered every window except a single slot cut eye-level high, edges sanded so the board could be dropped fast. The room felt smaller, air close, light artificial. Wes breathed through his mouth and told himself the smell was only wood glue and dust.
RayRay led him to the cooler. Inside, Mara had arranged shelves into aisles: canned fruit on the left, proteins center, liquids right. A plastic crate held bandages, iodine, burn gel. Elijah sat on a flour sack, coloring the back of a menu with a crayon found in a server apron. He drew stick figures holding hands under a sun that had no face.
RayRay pointed to the crate. "You get hurt, you come here. Do not bleed in the food. Do not waste iodine. One strip per wound, no second coat." He lifted a road flare from the crate and tucked it into Wes's belt. "If the door is breached, you crack this, toss it into the dining room. Smoke buys thirty seconds. Use them to get Mara and the boy to the roof."
Wes swallowed. He had never heard RayRay speak so many sentences at once. Each word felt measured, as if pulled from a reserve that had been running low for years. He nodded once, the motion slow, deliberate.
They left the cooler and walked to the front slot. RayRay slid the plywood aside an inch. Through the gap Wes saw the anchor corpse still lying beneath the sign, chain coiled beside it like a pet that had outlived its master. Flies crawled over the face, but the chest did not rise. Wes stared and felt something hard settle behind his ribs, a weight that had no name.
RayRay spoke without looking away from the glass. "You fired one round today. Seventeen left. Next bullet buys silence, not safety. Remember the price."
"I will," Wes said. His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat and said it again, louder.
RayRay closed the slot and dropped the board into place. He handed Wes a small LED headlamp. "Red filter only. White light draws them like moths." Then he walked toward the kitchen, boots heavy, and disappeared into the dark.
Wes checked his watch. Twenty hundred hours. He climbed the ladder to the roof and settled behind the parapet, rifle across his knees, binoculars around his neck. The night air carried the smell of cooling tar and distant smoke. He listened to the generator thrum below, counted the beats, and told himself the sound was a heartbeat the building still owned.
An hour passed. He scanned the lot in quadrants, wrote each observation in the notebook: no movement near the pumps, no new shadows between cars, no fresh drag marks on asphalt. He felt the rhythm settle into his bones, a cadence he could trust.
At twenty-one thirty a sound reached him, faint but steady: metal scraping concrete, slower than before. He raised the binoculars and searched. Near the far edge of the lot, beneath the burned-out streetlamp, a shape moved. It dragged one leg by a length of chain wrapped around the ankle, the same type that had anchored the first corpse. This one was smaller, maybe female, clothes shredded to ribbons. It limped toward the diner, head tilted, listening for the generator's hum.
Wes estimated forty yards. He lowered the binoculars, raised the rifle, and rested the fore-end on the parapet. Seventeen rounds in the magazine. He breathed in, breathed out, and waited for the shape to cross the white line RayRay had painted across the asphalt earlier, a boundary that made every bullet accountable.
The shape stopped just short of the line, lifted its face to the sky, and moaned. The sound carried, thin and broken, like wind forced through a cracked flute. Wes's finger tightened on the trigger, then eased. The shape did not move forward. It turned, dragged the chain in a slow circle, and began to limp away, back toward the dark beyond the lamps.
He watched until it vanished behind the last car, then lowered the rifle. Seventeen left. He wrote the number in the notebook, closed the cover, and stared at the empty lot. Somewhere inside his chest the weight shifted, not lighter, but familiar, like gear he had carried long enough to forget the straps were cutting.
The generator kept its rhythm. The neon buzzed. The fifth night rolled on, one hour closer to morning, one bullet closer to zero.