AVERY’S POV
Shit.
Not again.
I clamped my hand over Joel’s mouth and dragged him sideways into the nearest doorway in one motion, pressing him flat against the wall with my shoulder, my back to the street, and I held my breath, peeking around the corner.
The pack had stilled.
All of them, mid-step, heads up, that horrible collective stillness they had like they shared the same nervous system.
Joel was shaking so hard I could feel it through my palm.
His eyes were wide with fear and I leaned close, my breath brushing against his cheek.
“Don’t… Move.”
He stayed completely still.
I peeked at the street again.
The pack moved on.
We stayed in the doorway for another full minute, none of us moving, until the last of them had rounded the corner and the street was empty again.
Then I took my hand off Joel’s mouth and stepped back as he slid straight down the wall until he was sitting on the ground with his knees up and his head back, staring at the ceiling of the doorway like it had answers in it.
Hannah crouched beside him immediately, her face pale.
“Hey. Hey, you’re okay.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything for a moment, just sat there breathing and Hannah stayed next to him with her shoulder pressed to his.
My tongue darted out to wet my chapped lips.
At least that went without any confrontation.
“Sorry,” Joel said finally, voice rough.
“Don’t,” I looked down at him.
“Just breathe.”
“I just— the jacket, I recognised it from this store, I don’t even know why it —” He stopped and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a second.
“I don’t know the person. I just know the jacket.”
“I understand. You got overwhelmed.”
“That’s going to keep happening, isn’t it?” Hannah asked quietly, and she wasn’t asking about Joel specifically, she was asking about all of it, all the familiar things wearing wrong faces, all the streets that used to mean something now meaning something else entirely.
Would we ever get used to it?
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“You get used to it or you don’t and you can’t afford not to, so you get used to it.”
It came out harder than I meant it to but neither of them flinched.
Joel looked up at me with something in his face that wasn’t quite gratitude but close enough.
We had to move.
“Okay,” I nodded at them, “Let’s move.”
We made good time through the morning, better than the day before, partly because we were getting faster at reading the streets and partly because the three of us had stopped wasting energy on noise.
We communicated in gestures, glances and the occasional hissed word and it worked.
The city stayed terrible but navigable, and by midday we’d covered more ground than I’d expected.
What I couldn’t stop noticing was the absence of anyone else.
No survivors moving through the streets, no voices from buildings, no signs in windows, nothing.
Just the silence of a city that used to hold hundreds of thousands of people and was now somehow, horrifyingly empty of all of them.
“We haven’t seen anyone,” Hannah caught up with me, as though reading my mind, as we moved through the shell of what used to be a supermarket, stepping over scattered tins.
“Like, anyone alive.”
“Where did everyone go?”
“Northgate, maybe. Or sheltering somewhere we haven’t passed.” I didn’t say the other option out loud.
Like the fact that they could be mindless drones now or just… dead.
We found the apartment building around early afternoon— a six storey block with the ground floor windows blown out but the upper floors intact— and we went up to the third floor, found a flat with the door already open and nobody inside.
Great.
I forced a smile at the others.
“Let’s see if we can find anything.”
We raided it properly.
Tinned food from the kitchen cupboards, a lighter, two thick jackets, a torch with actual battery left, a first aid top-up and on the kitchen counter, sitting next to a cold mug of tea that someone had made and never drunk with a portable emergency radio still in its charging dock.
Joel picked it up and looked at me.
I nodded and he turned it on.
Static, static, and then— clear.
Clearer than anything we’d gotten since the campus.
“— this is HAVEN broadcast, repeating on all emergency frequencies. If you can hear this, you are not alone. HAVEN is active and operational. Proceed north to coordinates —” Static again.
“— three hundred miles north of the city centre. Food, shelter and medical support available. This is not a drill. HAVEN is real. We repeat, if you can hear this —”
The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to it cycle through twice without saying anything.
Then Hannah bit down on her lip, “Three hundred miles.”
I rubbed the pack of my neck, feeling dust and grime.
Oh, the luxury of a bath.
“On foot.”
“Not necessarily the whole way.” I was already thinking about cars, about fuel, about roads that might still be passable.
“Do we trust it?” Joel asked.
First full sentence he’d volunteered all day.
“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly, because the truth was that a clean clear broadcast telling survivors exactly where to go could be a lot of things and not all of them were good, but three hundred miles north was also a direction and a direction was more than we’d had this morning, so…
Joel sat down, tuning it as he waited for any other information.
After what felt like eternity, it came on again.
“Civilians approaching HAVEN must be wary of the drones. Humans turned into mindless killers. They are the fractured. Please do not approach anyone who exhibits strange behaviour. The rigs that wrecked the city are currently dormant but please approach with caution. I repeat—”
Hannah looked at me.
“Rigs?”
“I guess that’s what the military and government are calling them.”
Joel stared up at me.
“Is there a government?”
I made a sound low in my throat and stretched.
“I don’t know. We’re almost at the north gate. If nothing is there, we head on to HAVEN. It’s worth a shot. We have a bit before the strike.”
Standing up, I went around the house and I found a map in the kitchen drawer, the fold-out kind, slightly water damaged at the edges but readable, and I took it downstairs to the others.
I spread it across the table, uncapped the pen I’d pocketed from the pharmacy, found our position and found the coordinates from the broadcast and drew the line.
Hannah and Joel stood on either side of me.
“We go north,” I said, tracing the route with the pen.
“We stay off the motorway, it’ll be blocked and exposed.
These B roads run parallel most of the way, narrower but more cover.
First major stop is here —” I tapped a town about forty miles out, “— which gets us far enough from the blast radius if the airstrike timeline holds.
No one spoke.
I looked up.
“We have maybe three days before the strike window based on what the broadcast said yesterday. Three days to get forty miles clear minimum. That’s doable.”
Hannah looked at the line on the map and said nothing for a long moment, just looked at it, at the distance between where we were and where the coordinates sat at the top of the page.
Joel reached out and traced the line with his finger, slowly, from our position all the way north, and then he nodded once.
I folded the map, capped the pen, and put both in my jacket.
“Now, let’s find a place to rest for the night.”
We sheltered that night in a terraced house two streets over from the apartment block, ground floor windows already boarded from the inside by whoever had lived there.
I was supposed to be on first watch.
I mean, I was.
But I succumbed to the tiredness and drifted off the sleep.
And that was when I heard it.
A low whirring and sickenly familiar sound.
I was on my feet with the gun in my hand before I was fully awake, heart going from zero to everything in one second.
Fuck.
I pressed myself to the side of the window and looked out.
The street below was empty but the sound was getting louder, that subsonic frequency, and I felt it in my chest before I saw the light.
“What—” Hannah whispered behind me, voice sleep-rough and scared.
“Get down,” I muttered quietly.
“Right now, both of you, on the floor, away from the windows.”
“Is it a—”
“Down!”
They went down and I stayed at the edge of the window, back flat to the wall, and watched it come over the roofline.
A rig.
Smaller than the ones from the first day.
It was more agile and controlled.
Not causing any destruction, just moving through the air above the street in a slow deliberate pattern with that teal light bleeding from its underside in a wide scanning sweep, passing over rooftops, over rubble, over abandoned cars.
Running a pattern.
Looking for something.
What was it looking for?
My heart was in my throat and my fingers closed around my gun.
But what good would that even do?
It passed directly overhead and the subsonic pulse hit me so hard my back teeth ached with it.
I pressed myself flatter against the wall and didn’t move, didn’t breathe, and behind me I could hear Hannah’s breathing fast and shallow and Joel completely silent.
It moved on down the street.
I watched it go, let out a breath, and was just starting to straighten up when it stopped.
My heart stopped with it as time seemed to slow.
The light shifted, and the rig rotated in the air, smooth and mechanical and horrible, turning back the way it had come.
Scanning again.
It moved back up the street and stopped directly above the house we were in, teal light flooding down through the gaps in the boards on the ground floor windows, and I froze completely, gun in both hands, back against the wall, and stared at the ceiling as the light swept the front of the building once, twice, and the whole house hummed with the frequency of it.
Oh fuck.
It had found something.
It was looking right at us.