I died because she called me an asset.
Assets get written off.
The last sound wasn’t the dead pounding on the door.
It was her voice over the radio, flat as a spreadsheet: “Seal it.
He’s compromised.” Then the bar slipped from my hands, and the world went teeth.
I woke up in my Capitol Hill apartment to rain tapping the window and a phone buzzing with a news alert about “rabid attackers” in Portland.
Two weeks.
That’s how long I had before Seattle turned into a slaughterhouse….and before she decided I was overhead again.
I opened a new notebook and wrote one word at the top of the page: Ledger.
Under it, her name.
No anger.
No shaking hands.
Just numbers, routes, and the quiet certainty that this time, I would be the one holding the key.
By noon, I’d drained three accounts and bought silence from a pharmacist who owed me a favor.
By dusk, I had a warehouse key for the Duwamish industrial strip and a duffel full of fuel filters, water tabs, and antibiotics that didn’t ask questions.
Rain needled my jacket as I tested the loading dock door.
Thick steel.
Good sightlines.
One narrow stair to the office mezzanine.
I could hold this with two people and a lot of noise.
My phone buzzed again.
A new alert: “Hospital lockdown in Bellevue.”
I smiled.
Not because I was happy.
Because the numbers were lining up.
Ije’s routine hadn’t changed.
Morning coffee at the same corner spot in South Lake Union.
Black SUV idling at the curb.
Two drivers, one always on his phone.
I watched from a bus shelter, hood up, hands deep in my pockets.
She came out at 8:12, talking into an earpiece, eyes scanning the street like she expected a problem.
Good instincts.
Wrong problem.
I let her pass.
Then I followed the SUV, keeping three cars back, counting turns, timing lights, noting the garage code she tapped on a keypad under the Bellevue campus gate.
Assets are expendable.
I wrote the code in the Ledger.
Then I wrote: “Flip lab tech.
Confirm biometric bypass.”
Night fell hard.
The warehouse smelled like wet concrete and old cardboard.
I set the first lure by the dock: a battery-powered siren, a jerry can, a trail of rags soaked in diesel.
Simple.
Effective.
I didn’t sleep.
I mapped routes on my phone: I-5, I-90, ferry schedules, mountain passes.
I marked choke points with red pins and safe houses with blue.
At 3:17 a.m., a new alert: “Multiple animal attacks in Pioneer Square.”
I capped my pen.
Patient Zero had arrived.
I tested the lure at 4:03 a.m.
I triggered the siren and stood on the mezzanine, watching the street below.
Within minutes, shapes stumbled into the light….wrong angles, wet sounds, hands clawing at the air.
I cut the siren.
They millied, confused, drawn to the diesel trail.
I lit it.
Fire rolled down the wet asphalt like a river of orange glass.
The ones that reached the flame didn’t stop burning.
Good.
I went back inside and added a line to the Ledger: “Lures work.
Noise + fuel = funnel.”
Then I wrote her name again, underlined twice.
Tomorrow, I’d start taking pieces off the board.
Dawn came gray and mean.
I packed the duffel, slung a machete across my back, and checked the pistol…six rounds, suppressed, just in case.
As I stepped out into the rain, my phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number
“We know you woke up early.
Meet us at the ferry terminal.
Come alone.”
I stared at the screen.
The rain tapped harder, like fingers testing glass.
Someone else remembered.
And they were already hunting.