Brice slept in the thin, ragged gap between exhaustion and hyper-vigilance.
It was a soldier’s kind of sleep—shallow, porous, and easily shattered.
Years of drifting through the gray zones of existence had trained him that way. Sleeping in the back of his Ford Escape. Crashing in cramped highway motels. Huddling under a dashboard when the world outside felt too unstable to trust. His body knew how to rest without ever fully surrendering.
Even asleep, some part of him was listening.
A floorboard groaned.
A dry, protesting snap of old pine.
Brice’s eyes didn’t open.
They snapped wide.
His body didn’t wake up.
It detonated into motion.
But he was already too late.
CRACK!
The impact landed like a white-hot thunderclap against the back of his shoulder. Pain burst through him in a blinding wave, followed by the sickening, wet crunch of something deep shifting wrong. His vision grayed at the edges as he hit the floor hard, the warehouse tilting around him while every survival instinct in his body screamed one command.
Move.
He rolled before the second strike could land, boots scraping through the thick dust on the concrete. His bad arm hung useless and burning, but he forced himself up anyway, staggering backward into the dark.
Then he saw him.
David.
The man he had shared food with only hours ago stood in front of him, chest heaving, a tire iron trembling in both hands. The metal was stained with a fresh, dark smear.
Behind him, Carla stood rigid as a statue. Her hand was steady, but her face was not. A compact pistol was leveled squarely at Brice’s chest. Her eyes were rimmed red, swollen with grief, terror, and something uglier than both.
Guilt.
“What the hell, David?” Brice roared.
The silence after his voice faded felt heavier than the darkness outside. Not awkward. Not tense.
Funeral-heavy.
“This isn’t funny,” Brice said, his voice dropping into a dangerous growl. “You’ve got three seconds before I start treating you like the monsters I’ve been dodging.”
David swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed like it hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out.
Brice let out one sharp, humorless laugh. “You shatter my shoulder, and your opening line is I’m sorry?”
Carla’s lip trembled. A jagged sob slipped out of her. “They don’t want us, Brice. They only want the Awakened.”
The air changed.
Brice went still.
The pieces slammed together all at once. The clean white buses. The selective pickups. The doctor’s sterile smile. The way those people had looked at him less like a survivor and more like a specimen with legs.
“The buses,” Brice whispered.
David finally looked up. His eyes were glassy and pleading. “They told us they don’t hurt normals. They said they’re only taking the ones like you. I haven’t heard from my wife or my boy since the Wave hit. They promised me they’d find them. They promised me they’d keep them safe.”
Brice took one slow step forward. His injured shoulder screamed, but he ignored it.
“They lied to you, David.”
David flinched.
“You know they lied,” Brice said. “And they’re going to lie to you again the second they have what they want.”
“I know!” David screamed.
His voice cracked so hard the words nearly broke apart.
“I know,” he said again, weaker this time. “But it’s the only chance I have to see them again.”
Brice stared at him, breathing hard through the pain.
“Then untie this knot,” he said, deadly calm. “Put the gun down. We all walk out of here together, and we find out how this ends.”
David’s grip tightened around the tire iron.
“I can’t.”
“You can,” Brice spat. “You just won’t.”
Three deliberate knocks thundered against the massive corrugated metal doors.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
David closed his eyes.
A tear tracked through the grease on his cheek.
“They’re here.”
The warehouse door groaned upward on rusted rollers. Blinding white floodlights poured into the room, clinical and merciless, turning the dust in the air into a storm of glittering ash. A white bus rolled inside, its engine barely louder than a whisper compared to the violent thrum of Brice’s pulse.
Men in pristine white uniforms stepped out.
They moved with calm, practiced efficiency. Not soldiers storming a building. Not scavengers making a grab.
Technicians collecting property.
A doctor with wire-rimmed glasses walked forward, digital tablet in hand. He stopped a few yards from Brice, tapped the screen, and studied him like a number finally matching an inventory list.
“Subject confirmed,” the doctor said.
No anger.
No excitement.
No humanity.
Brice felt something cold settle in his gut.
Subject.
Two security guards in tactical vests advanced.
Brice didn’t wait.
He exploded forward.
His fist connected with the first guard’s jaw in a blur of motion. The man’s head snapped sideways, and his body crashed into a stack of rusted shelving hard enough to make the metal scream. The second guard drew a baton, but Brice caught his wrist mid-swing and twisted.
Snap.
The bone gave with a wet, ugly sound. Brice drove an elbow into the guard’s ribs and sent him folding to the floor.
The doctor didn’t even step back.
He only tapped his tablet again.
“Remarkable,” he said. “Physical enhancement exceeds previous projections.”
Three more guards rushed him.
Brice met them like a cornered predator.
He threw one over his shoulder into the concrete. He ducked under a sweeping strike, drove his knee into another man’s stomach, and headbutted a third hard enough to send him stumbling backward with blood spraying from his nose. For one bright, impossible second, it looked like he might tear a hole through their whole formation.
Then pain split the world open.
CRACK!
The tire iron caught him across the spine.
White noise swallowed everything.
Brice collapsed to his knees. His palms slapped the concrete, dust puffing up around his fingers. He turned, vision swimming, and saw David standing behind him.
The steel bar slipped from David’s numb fingers.
It hit the floor with a hollow clatter.
“I…” David’s voice was broken beyond repair. “I’m sorry.”
Brice looked at him.
He wasn’t angry anymore.
That was the worst part.
He was just tired.
Bone-deep.
Soul-deep.
Tired of monsters with claws.
Tired of monsters with uniforms.
Tired of desperate people convincing themselves betrayal was just another kind of survival.
“Me too,” Brice whispered.
A stun baton drove into his side.
Agony detonated through him.
Every muscle in his body locked at once, turning him into a rigid, trembling cage. His teeth clamped together so hard his jaw screamed. The world strobed white, black, white, black, while his body tried and failed to obey him.
The doctor approached.
He peeled the seal off a pre-loaded syringe. The needle glinted under the floodlights.
“This will only take a moment,” the doctor said.
He smiled the way a man might smile at a prize animal before cutting it open.
The needle slid into the side of Brice’s neck.
Cold flooded his veins.
Not normal cold.
Chemical cold.
Deep, artificial, and wrong.
The warehouse lights stretched into long white ribbons. The engine of the bus became a low, melodic thrum, pulling him down by degrees. His thoughts scattered. His limbs went distant. The pain receded, not because it was gone, but because his mind was being dragged too far away to hold it.
The last thing he saw was David standing in the glare of the floodlights.
A broken man.
A coward.
A father.
A traitor.
And somehow, all of those things at once.
David couldn’t bring himself to meet Brice’s eyes.
Then the world collapsed into velvet black.
As Brice’s consciousness dissolved, a voice crackled through the comm-link in the doctor’s ear, cold and distant.
“Subject One-Eight-Three secured. Notify Project Genesis. Phase Two begins.”