AVERY’S POV
After a long time of hushed plans, skepticism and hushed conversations, we decided to spend the night in the gym, huddled in the corner.
Tomorrow, we would make up our minds and leave this place before the air strike.
But no one slept.
I don’t think anyone even tried, not really — we just sat in the dark with our backs against the wall and waited for dawn to come and tried not to think too hard about the night before.
The lamp died somewhere around 3am and after that it was just darkness and breathing and the distant sound of something moving outside that none of us commented on out loud.
When the light started coming in grey and thin through the high windows I stood up and said we were moving.
“Now?” Theo asked, dragging himself to his feet.
“Now.”
“It’s barely light—”
“Which means anything out there has less visibility on us than it will in an hour, so yes, now.” I was already checking the gun, counting what I had again, tucking the spare magazine into my jacket pocket.
“Anyone coming with me needs to be ready in five minutes.”
Six of them came.
Keiran, Hannah, Demi who was a young teacher, a girl named Saoirse who’d barely spoken, Callum who was nineteen and kept talking about finding the police, and Joel— not the Joel who died, a different Joel, the one who hadn’t said a single word since the basement and just followed wherever the group moved like he was on a string.
Theo didn’t come.
Three others didn’t come either, said they were heading deeper into the city, said they had people there, said the broadcast was probably outdated by now and Northgate was too far and too exposed.
I didn’t argue with them because they were right that I couldn’t guarantee Northgate was safe, I could only guarantee that sitting in a building that reminded us of everything that happened was going to drive us insane.
“Stay away from main roads,” I told the ones who weren’t coming.
“Move at dawn and dusk, not midday. Don’t make noise.”
Theo nodded like he was committing it to memory and I didn’t say goodbye because it felt too much like one of us was walking to our deaths and it would feel like a final goodbye.
We went out through the side exit.
The cold hit me first, sharper than I expected, and then the smell— smoke and something underneath it that I didn’t want to identify— and then the street opened up in front of us and I stopped walking for just a second because I couldn’t help it.
I’d lived in this city for two years but right now?
I didn’t recognise any of it.
Burned out cars sitting at angles across the road like someone had thrown them there, and in a few cases that was probably exactly what had happened.
A whole building facade collapsed across the pavement, rubble spilling into the street in this massive grey heap and jutting out of it at the far end, half-buried, was one of the mechs.
I stopped in my tracks, unable to even breath as I stared at it.
Dead.
Dormant.
Teal lights cold and dark, all six limbs locked in place like it had just frozen mid-step and never came back.
It was the first time I’d seen one not moving and somehow that was worse, just the sheer size of it sitting there in the wreckage like it had always been part of the skyline.
“Oh my god,” Saoirse whispered behind me.
“Is it—”
No.
It wasn’t.
Just… Dormant.
Like it had caused enough destruction and went to sleep.
“Keep moving,” I said quietly, pulling my eyes away from it, “and keep your voice down.”
We moved in a loose staggered line, me at the front and Keiran at the back, staying close to the walls and cutting through the side streets rather than following the main road.
The city was silent in this specific awful way that cities aren’t supposed to be silent— no traffic, no voices, no distant sound of anything normal, just the wind and our footsteps and occasionally something that might have been movement a few streets over that we all heard but none of us acknowledged.
The bodies were the hardest part.
I had seen them yesterday but because yesterday had been chaos and chaos gives you somewhere to put things, but this— this slow quiet walk through streets full of people who hadn’t made it didn’t give me anywhere to put anything.
I kept my eyes forward and my breathing steady and I didn’t look too closely at anything on the ground.
I think everyone else was doing the same thing because nobody said a word for the first forty minutes.
Then Callum said, “There has to be police somewhere, right, like emergency services don’t just disappear… ”
“Callum,” Keiran said from the back.
“I’m just saying, if we could find even one officer, one person with actual authority—”
“Lower your voice,” I hissed without turning around.
“I am lowering my voice, I’m saying we should have a backup plan in case Northgate is —”
“It’s the plan we have,” I cut him off.
“So it’s the plan we’re using.”
He sighed, shifting uneasily.
Keiran caught up to me.
“Hey…”
I barely looked up.
“Hey.”
“Sure you can use that?” He nodded to the gun tightly gripped in my hand.
My gaze dropped to it.
“My dad was in the military. I kinda learnt a bit.” I said vaguely.
He let out a small sound to acknowledge it and then went silent.
We saw the first mutant about an hour in.
It was standing in the middle of an intersection about thirty metres ahead of us, just standing there completely still and from a distance it looked almost normal— just a person standing in a street— but the angle was wrong in this subtle way that my body registered before my brain did, something about the way the weight was distributed, the way the head sat on the neck, and I put my fist up and the whole group stopped behind me without a sound.
We watched it for a long moment but it didn’t move.
I gestured left and we took the long way around, pressing through a narrow gap between two buildings, single file and nobody breathed properly until we came out on the other side and it was out of sight, and then Saoirse let out this shaking exhale and Hannah grabbed her arm briefly to steady her.
By the time we’d been out for two hours I’d counted eleven of them across various streets and intersections, and those were just the ones I’d seen.
I was trying very hard not to think about the ones I hadn’t because that way lay a kind of panic I couldn’t afford, so I just kept moving and kept counting the group behind me and kept running the route to Northgate in my head like if I mapped it enough times it would get shorter.
We were rounding a back street running parallel to the old shopping stretch, moving fast and tight to the left wall, when Callum stopped walking.
I noticed because the line behind me shifted and I turned.
He was standing maybe ten metres back staring down the far end of the alley with his brow pulled together.
“What?” I hissed.
He pointed.
There was a person at the end of the alley.
Back to us, hood up, green university hoodie, just standing there, and for a second, she looked completely normal and I think that was what broke something in Callum because he’d been holding on by his fingernails this whole time and something about a girl in a university hoodie on a familiar street just—
“Hey!” he called out, stepping forward, “hey, are you—”
“Callum, no—” I grabbed his arm but he’d already said it, it was already out there, hanging in the air, and the girl at the end of the alley turned.
Her neck went too far and the street behind her wasn’t empty.
The whole horde turned and there was a sound that I felt in my back teeth, this rising snarl that bounced off every wall and I didn’t think, I just reacted— “Go! Go, move, move!” I shoved Hannah forward and raised the gun at the nearest one and fired twice and ran.
Shit, shit, shit!
They were fast, that was the thing nobody could have prepared me for, bodies moving like something liquid, pouring down the alley toward us.
I fired again over my shoulder and kept running, Hannah’s jacket in my fist, pulling her with me while screaming at the others to move.
One of them was gaining on Keiran and he turned, elbowed it hard enough that it went down, but the move split him from the group and I watched him, Demi and Callum veer left down a side street and then a corner took them out of my sight and they were gone.
No!—Keiran —
I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop, the horde was still coming and Joel was right behind me and Hannah was gasping.
I saw a pharmacy on the right with the front window already blown out and I pulled them both through the gap, glass crunching under our feet, and straight through to the back and into the stockroom where I dragged the heaviest shelf unit I could move in front of the door with Hannah grabbing the other side without being told.
It scraped across the tiles and hit the door with a heavy thud.
We stood there as the horde thundered past outside, that sound shaking through the walls.
A bottle fell off a shelf and Hannah flinched so hard she hit the shelf behind her, and I pressed my back against the unit and put my hand over my own mouth.
Oh god.
Oh god, Keiran and the others.
The sound outside peaked and then slowly, slowly started to thin, moving further down the street, and the stockroom went quiet except for Hannah’s breathing and the complete silence coming from Joel’s corner.
I looked at him.
He was sitting against the back wall with his knees up and his eyes open, wide with terror and guilt.
Hannah slid down the shelf unit until she was sitting on the floor and put her face in her hands, her whole body shaking.
I wanted to say something to her but I didn’t have anything, so I kept quiet.
I looked down at the gun instead and dropped the magazine into my palm, counted what I had left, running the numbers once, and then I ran them again because the first answer hadn’t seemed real.
Same answer.
I closed my eyes for exactly two seconds, snapped them back open, and looked at the door.
It was holding.
The shelf unit wasn’t moving.
Outside, the street was going quiet.
Fuck.
I didn’t know where the others were.
And I only had seven bullets left.