The scream from the retail floor cut through the corridor like a blade dragged across metal, sudden and raw and unmistakably human, which meant two things at once.
Someone was still alive out there, though they were also about to die if Arty chose wrong in the next three seconds. He refused to give himself a fourth.
"Counter first," he said, already moving.
Leah didn't argue. Her breath caught once before steadying as she fell in behind him, the water bottles thumping lightly against the first aid kit tucked beneath her arm while she tightened her grip on the tyre iron.
The corridor opened into the service station shop in a spill of flickering fluorescent light, the front half of the room half-visible through staggered aisles of chips.
Drinks, confectionery, and the cheap seasonal rubbish every servo seemed doomed to stock regardless of whether anyone wanted it.
Two ceiling panels near the fridges had blackened around the edges, one light buzzing so hard it looked ready to fail outright.
Glass crunched underfoot somewhere near the counter, a drink fridge hung open with its contents spilling onto the tiles, bottles rolling, hissing, and leaking across the floor.
Three of the creatures had already made their way into the retail area.
One stood near the front windows, battering mindlessly at the glass as if something outside had caught its ruined attention more strongly than the people inside.
Another had half-climbed over a fallen display rack and was dragging itself free in ugly and determined jerks.
The third was behind the counter, bent over something on the floor that Arty didn't need to see clearly to understand. The screaming had stopped. Somehow, that worried him even more.
He heard the sound she made behind him, small and involuntary, the kind of noise people made when they lost hope and knew it before they had time to lie to themselves.
"Stay with me," he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the room.
A movement near the back of the counter snapped his focus right toward it. A hand appeared first, pale and shaking, then the top half of a man's face rose into view behind the cigarette display.
His eyes wide with the stunned, exhausted disbelief of someone who had already been sure he was finished and hadn't caught up to the fact he wasn't.
The zombie behind the counter turned at the same moment, its head jerking sharply toward the new sound and then toward Arty as if it had to choose which fresh stimulus mattered more.
Arty made the decision for it. He crossed the distance fast, stepping around a spill of glass and kicking the fallen rack hard enough to shove it into the path of the thing dragging itself free from the floor display.
The counter zombie lunged as he closed the distance, one blood-slick hand slapping against the counter edge while its body twisted toward him with a speed that shouldn't have existed in something so badly broken.
The wrench came down before it reached full extension. The impact cracked across the room with enough force to bounce the thing sideways into the register. It hit, dropped, twitched, and tried to rise again.
"Of course," Arty muttered.
He swung a second time, lower and harder, and this time the body folded fully out of the fight, collapsing behind the counter with a wet, ugly finality he chose not to examine too closely.
The one at the window reacted to the noise and peeled away from the glass, turning in a stagger that became a rush almost immediately.
Leah moved before he said anything to her. The tyre iron flashed up and caught the thing across the side of the knee with a crack that twisted the leg inward at a wrong angle and dropped it to one side.
Arty stepped in and brought the wrench down across its skull before it could fully reorient itself.
Leah had good instincts. That was going to matter if either of them intended to survive.
The third one, the one tangled in the fallen rack, made a furious scraping sound as it fought the metal and plastic, not trapped in any meaningful sense, just delayed.
Arty grabbed a stack of bottled water from the nearest shelf and hurled it down on top of the rack. Plastic burst, bottles scattered, and the extra weight collapsed the angle of the display enough to jam the thing more firmly under it.
"Three seconds," he said.
Leah didn't ask what he meant, she moved straight for the counter. The man behind it tried to stand and almost failed, one hand pressed against his side while the other gripped the edge hard enough that his knuckles had gone white.
"Can you move?" Arty asked.
The man nodded too fast, then winced. "I can try."
"You'll have to try faster." Arty chided.
Arty vaulted the half-door at the end of the counter and crouched just long enough to confirm what he already suspected. The thing on the floor that had drawn the third zombie's attention wasn't getting back up.
A woman in station uniform, maybe mid-thirties, lay twisted awkwardly beside the cigarette cabinet with one arm under her at a surreal angle and most of her throat gone.
He let his eyes slide off her immediately and searched instead for anything useful. Keys hung from a hook under the till, cash sat in the drawer, less than he wanted, more than he'd had.
A small lockbox stood open beside a terminal screen that had frozen halfway through what looked like a pump override menu. The fuel controls were what they needed most right now.
He swept the drawer contents and the keyring into his pocket, then yanked open the cabinet below the counter and found what he was hoping for.
Two packs of batteries, a utility knife, three cheap lighters, and a box of shelf-stable protein bars that now had a value far beyond what any sane world would have assigned them yesterday morning.
He shoved all of it onto the counter. "Bag." he said.
Leah was already ahead of him, dragging a reusable shopping bag from a rack by the lotto stand and scooping the supplies into it with efficient yet angry movements.
The man had managed to stand, though he looked as though a stiff breeze would have knocked him straight back onto the floor.
He wore a servo polo darkened with blood near the ribs, though the stain sat low enough that Arty couldn't tell immediately if it was his blood or something else's.
"What's your name?" Arty asked.
"Dale." he replied.
"Have you been bitten?" Leah asked.
Dale looked down at the blood on his shirt as if he hadn't fully processed it yet. "Cut it on a shelf," he said, breathless. "One of the glass fridge doors blew when they hit it. It's mine… Mostly."
"Mostly" wasn't a word that inspired confidence. It usually meant the interesting part of the story hadn't been told yet.
The rack in the aisle groaned as the trapped zombie freed one arm. Ten minutes might be optimistic. A heavy slam came from the rear corridor, then another, something had found the shed door or the cool room door and decided it objected to obstacles.
Leah heard it too. "This place is done. we really need to get out of here."
"It was done before I got here," Arty stated.
His eyes flicked to the cool room door again, the blood smear beneath it had been drawn outward, pooling under the door.
That meant someone had been dragged from inside or had tried to get out and failed, either way, checking it now would cost time they no longer had.
The scream had come from here, not there. One living person was a certainty. More than that was wishful thinking. The trapped zombie tore free enough to twist its upper body toward them.
One shoulder remained pinned by the collapsed rack and drink crates, but its head and one arm were mobile now, fingers clawing against the tiles with blind determination.
"Leave it," Arty said as Dale lifted a hand toward a nearby mop handle like he might use it as a weapon. "We're moving."
Dale looked at him, then at the front windows. "Out there?"